How to thrive in the digital age
Tech entrepreneur and founder of tech start-up Cogrammar, Riaz Moola has brought his coding skills to the continent to transform entire workforces and economies to thrive in the digital age
GQ: You’ve been dubbed the South African Steve Jobs – is it a title that pleases you?
Riaz Moola: It isn’t. Primarily because it doesn’t reflect the fact that many of the achievements attributed to me were the result of the relentless efforts of our team which has spanned old and young, experienced and inexperienced, and people from all over the world.
GQ: What motivated the creation of Hyperion [now Cogrammar]?
RM: I founded Hyperion to solve a problem I witnessed in my first year of university: high dropout rates within the computer science degrees in South Africa because students were struggling to master programming skills. Hyperion was initially a community of university students, but after Facebook partnered with us to become one of the top education technology startups in Africa, we realised we could have a more global impact.
GQ: Can you tell us about Cogrammar?
RM: Cogrammar is an evolution of our initial ideas, empowering African talent to embark on a career as a code reviewer – like an “editor” for code. Through this work, we’re helping to create new careers in a country with one of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates.
GQ: Was Cogrammar’s operational model inspired by a video game?
RM: I learnt how people-led communities could achieve great things in a simulated world of World of Warcraft. In this game, I led two large communities of players from around the world, and we took on competitive tasks in a game played by over 10 million people. When I first started Hyperion, I replicated the model for communities at a larger scale to power a model run by humans, rather than scaling with technology alone. Our code-review-as-a-service model at Cogrammar is the same – we scale our service using a combination of technology and hundreds of human code reviewers.
GQ: What sets Cogrammar apart in software development education?
RM: Cogrammar operates the Cogrammar Careers Programme, a coding bootcamp designed to transition people into a career as a code reviewer, and Hyperiondev, which operates several coding bootcamps designed to transition people with no tech skills into web, software and mobile development jobs. In our last graduate survey, over 95% of students reported reaching their career outcomes. Seventy-three percent of our responding graduates switched to a career in tech in under three months of graduating, and the average annual salary increase post-graduation was over
R144 000 in just months.
GQ: Does Cogrammar place importance on human mentorship?
RM: The idea behind a technical educator or coding mentor is new. We take a long-term view of an individual’s skill set and relate it to code review. We believe that we can build the world’s largest workforce of technical code reviewers out here in Africa – starting with SA – by designing the training to push people into being an expert code reviewer. Our recent Cogrammar Careers cohort shows that we have more than enough talent to build a workforce for this – we had over 2 000 applicants for 66 places on our Cogrammar training programme in a space of two weeks.
GQ: How is Cogrammar improving career prospects for students from disadvantaged backgrounds?
RM: Our Cogrammar Careers programme is 100% tuition free and aimed at lower income demographics. We’ve partnered with non-profits and grant funders to make this career path available to those who may not have the means to attend traditional tertiary institutions in SA. A career as a code reviewer is valued at an equal level to that of a software developer. We see this as an excellent opportunity for underserved demographics in our country to get real outcomes for themselves and their families in a short space of time.
GQ: Can you provide any insights into the work being done towards closing the global skills gap in the software development arena?
RM: Education technology company 2U, which acquired local startup Getsmarter for over $100 million (R1.4 billion) a few years ago, recently bought Trilogy Education for $750million (R10.6 billion). Trilogy has a unique model – partnering with universities in the US to allow them to offer and sell coding bootcamps under their own brand. This massive adoption and evolution of the coding bootcamp model has now spread to the UK and Europe, and is likely to revolutionise and set the standard for university-powered coding bootcamp education, allowing universities to play a critical role in providing software development education at a larger scope. GQ: What plans do you have for the future?
RM: I’m working with our team to extend Cogrammar through new partnerships with equity investors, grant makers, and leading tech education and recruitment companies in the US and Europe. We’re positioned for massive growth in our code reviewer base – in under eight months we’ve grown tenfold in the number of code reviews we process for clients weekly, now in the thousands. The next eight months are likely to take us to similar growth, and we’re always keen to explore new local and international opportunities.
We’re creating new careers in a country with one of the world’s highest youth unemployment rates