Tech For Impact

What’s it like working in software development and IT in the nonprofit sector? We talked to two people blazing a trail in this world.

By Callum Fraser – Director: Partnerships & Systems

Lazola Makhupula is the Chief Platform Officer at SmartStart, overseeing the full technology stack of one of the largest nonprofits in the country. They recently won a Skoll Foundation award for their fantastic model of empowering micro-enterprises to offer high quality early childhood development services. This work focuses on increasing access to quality early learning for young children across South Africa, and provides a means for under or unemployed women to make a fair living outside of the existing job market.

Lazola’s journey to working in this world started when he was between jobs as a younger man. He had health issues at a job for a mining company and returned home where he volunteered through an organisation called Kheth’Impilo. He was exposed to the health needs of his family’s local communities and saw how much impact he could have working for good. Since then, he has been committed to working with impact driven organisations.

Michael van Niekerk is a Software Engineer at GiveDirectly, fulfilling a goal he has had for many years. Michael was working as a software engineer after university, but he came across some literature on effective altruism that inspired him and made sense to him on a fundamental level. He also had friends from university and school who worked in roles that have a positive impact on society, and he was inspired to make this career shift himself. Today, at GiveDirectly, he builds software that efficiently and effectively transfers money from philanthropists to those who need it most.

What is it like working in Tech for Impact?

Lazola has less experience working in corporate tech jobs himself, but many of his ex-colleagues and professional friends tell him about the horror stories they experience. He’s hosted many braai’s that turn into counselling sessions where his friends try to make sense of the stress that comes with their jobs. They also share the innovation and pace of corporate, which is something he envies for the impact sector.

Michael has direct experience of this stress from his time at Amazon. He worked in a small team with big responsibilities, and regularly had to be on call for emergencies that saw thousands of profit-generating services go down. He found that when things went wrong in these environments, responses were sometimes escalated quickly and aggressively in a way that looks for someone to blame rather than learning from the situation as a team.

Both Michael and Lazola described the stresses and personal expectations in the non-profit world as less intense than the corporate world. You are working with people who have decided to dedicate their careers to working for others, so there is inherently less toxicity and unfair expectations placed onto workers.

While the work-life balance in the non-profit world might be appealing, Michael and Lazola are both driven people with ambitious goals for their careers. Sometimes it can be more exhausting and frustrating to work in a slower-paced team if that doesn’t suit your own working style preferences.

However, both Michael and Lazola are happy with their teams currently. Michael feels more challenged by his colleagues than ever before, and Lazola finds the real-world challenges of his job fascinating and satisfying to work through. Both spoke about how when moving into a role in the impact sector, it’s very important to have resonance with your team in terms of your approach to work, urgency and meeting deadlines. Make sure that you ask hard questions during the interview stage so you can make an informed decision.

Do you think of leaving?

Both Michael and Lazola, along with most skilled software engineers and IT experts, are regularly headhunted and approached for roles in the corporate world. However, neither of them have any plans of leaving this world soon.

Lazola pinpointed his preference for working on projects with depth rather than profit driven scale as a key factor for keeping him working in impact. He spoke about how an organisation like Bulungula Incubator, which focused on working with one specific community, has now developed technology and interventions that other communities are keen on using. This is an interesting parallel to tech corporations that crave scale as soon as possible in order to attract private equity. Working in tech for impact allows teams to work on more complex problems that can improve people’s lives in a step-by-step process, instead of working to design something that is automatically a failure unless millions download it every day.

Michael is grateful for his time in the corporate world at Amazon and other companies, but he won’t be returning any time soon. He said that young people who want to work in impact should not be scared of starting out in these jobs so they can learn about coding for production, the high stakes of enterprise software development and the pressure from number-crunching bosses. You can see these first few jobs of your career as an extended university experience, so you can bring even more excellence and a valuable perspective into your first impact job when you make the switch.

Michael and Lazola both spoke about how they have peers who are either earning higher salaries or on more financially rewarding paths, but they don’t have envy for those career journeys. Working in tech for impact, you can still earn an excellent salary that reflects your high level of technical skill and work ethic. For Michael, Lazola, and many more tech professionals with a conscience for the current state of our world, the benefits of working in jobs that fundamentally aim to improve conditions for vulnerable and disenfranchised people far outweighs a higher salary.

If you’re interested in pivoting your technology career to be more impact-focused, speak to Action Appointments today about joining our database. We can also advise you on some places you could volunteer with your technology experience so you can try out the experience of working in tech for impact. It just might be the start of the rest of your life.