Work Remote (as an Ethiopian developer)

Working for a company that resides abroad and pays in foreign currency can never match any opportunity out here, and y’all should strive for getting one or two of those in your lifetime.

I haven’t successfully landed remote gigs through platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. I cannot say I tried harder, but I assume all the efforts and pennies I would spend on pursuing that won’t be worth it, given the market saturation. What was possible for me, and I consider it pure luck for my case, was that I had people to vouch for my name and work to land me something substantial.

As I have discussed here before, it was through a recommendation from a potential colleague that I landed my last contract work for a German-based company. And the truth is that I don’t know this guy in real life, and we didn’t use to talk online either. If we take luck out of the play, the thing that helped me through this may also be that I sell myself a lot more than I build (and I admit).

Even with late payrolls and not working for the last 3ish months on the project, my finances are still intact, and I made my wildest dreams of having a personal laptop come true with the income I made on the job.

Finances shouldn’t be the entire drive to get you up in the morning for your stand-ups, but purpose and mission play the biggest role in your mundane activities of merging changes to the major repo. Lucky for you, most remote jobs from overseas provide such passionate worthiness feelings because, in most cases, you are required to work on big impact projects with thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of consumers/users.

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I highly recommend everyone to keep their hearts away from this timezone as much as possible and strive for excellence in technical capabilities and effective personal branding. That would completely change your trajectory both in your career-building journey and financial portfolio and prospects.

Numbers (as an anecdote) from my experience

⁃ First month of the contract work earnings (I worked for 11 days the first month), I doubled my entire 2024 income.

⁃ Second month of the contract work earnings, I could afford and purchase a MacBook Pro M4 14-inch

⁃ Third month of the contract, I am adjusting a medical trip (that may or may not happen)

⁃ Fourth and Fifth month contract earnings are not here yet.

⁃ After that, my team stopped working on the project for obvious reasons.

– In total, 2025 broken employment seasons 6xed my total. 12 months’ worth of employment and gig earnings from 2024.

– The app we worked on was once in the top 5 list of US Photos & Videos apps category on the App Store.

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Software Development

Remote Working

Outsourcing