Ten years ago, when we started Starks IT Consulting, the conventional wisdom was that building a world-class technology team in Lagos was essentially impossible. The talent wasn't there. The infrastructure wasn't there. The ecosystem wasn't there.
That conventional wisdom was wrong. Lagos is now producing engineering talent that competes globally — we have placed engineers with Bay Area companies and had them return to Nigeria because they wanted to build something at home. But building and keeping a great engineering team here requires strategies that are genuinely different from what works in London or San Francisco.
On Hiring: Potential Over Credentials
The first and most consequential thing we changed early in our history was abandoning degree requirements as a filter. Some of our best engineers have computer science degrees from Covenant or OAU or Unilag. Some have degrees in accounting or law. Several never attended university at all.
What predicts engineering excellence at Starks is curiosity, problem-solving approach, and the ability to learn independently — none of which are captured by a degree transcript. We assess these through a structured technical process that involves a real problem from our actual work, with no time pressure, and a deep conversation about how the candidate approached it.
We do not accept whiteboard coding challenges that test the ability to memorise algorithm patterns under pressure. That is not what engineers do in real work, and it selects for people who have had the privilege of intensive interview coaching — which is not evenly distributed.
On Compensation: Compete Globally, Not Just Locally
This is the piece most Nigerian tech employers get wrong. The market for senior Nigerian engineers is global. A Lagos-based full-stack engineer with five years of experience has credible alternatives: a remote role with a European fintech paying in euros, or a US startup paying in dollars via Toptal or Andela. If you benchmark compensation only against other Lagos employers, you will consistently lose your best people to the global market.
We benchmark against the 50th percentile of remote roles in the UK for comparable positions. This is affordable because our total employment costs remain significantly lower than hiring the same talent in London — we do not need to match London cost-of-living allowances. But it means we are paying our senior engineers significantly more than the Lagos market average, and our retention reflects that.
On Growth: A Learning Budget That Is Not Optional
Every engineer at Starks has a mandatory learning budget of ₦600,000 per year — mandatory in the sense that if they do not use it, we ask why. This budget can be spent on conference attendance, cloud certifications, courses, books, or co-working space memberships that improve their thinking environment.
We have found that engineers who do not invest in their own development tend to stagnate and then leave. The ones who use their learning budget aggressively tend to stay and grow into leadership roles. The correlation is strong enough that "uses learning budget proactively" is now one of the informal signals we use in promotion decisions.
Beyond the formal budget, we have an internal engineering blog, a weekly technical discussion (we call it Thursday Thinks), and a culture of sharing what we learn on client projects across the team. Knowledge hoarding — treating what you know as job security — is a cultural pattern we actively work to prevent.
On Retention: Flexible Work Before It Was Fashionable
We have offered fully flexible working arrangements since 2018 — three years before COVID made it the default. Engineers can work from anywhere. Core hours are 10am–2pm WAT when we need synchronous collaboration. The rest of the day is theirs to manage.
The impact on retention has been significant. Engineers with young children, caring responsibilities, or who simply do better without a two-hour Lagos commute each way are able to do their best work and stay with us. The commute alone — 3–4 hours per day in Lagos traffic — was a meaningful factor in early attrition before we made the change.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Even doing all of this right, you will lose engineers. The combination of global remote work opportunities, aggressive recruiting by international companies, and the Lagos brain drain to London and Canada is a structural headwind that no individual employer can fully counteract.
What you can control is the rate of attrition and the quality of the people who choose to stay. Engineers who stay at Starks for 3+ years consistently tell us the same things: they stay for the quality of the work, the people they work with, and the sense that they are building something that matters in their own country. No salary alone keeps great engineers anywhere for long — the intrinsic factors matter more than most employers acknowledge.
If you are building a technology team in Nigeria and want to discuss any of these practices in more depth, we are always open to that conversation. The rising tide of Nigerian technology talent lifts all of us.