Web development in Bangladesh
/
The software industry in Bangladesh is making huge leaps in recent years. BASIS the lead association for software companies Bangladesh showed that the export earnings was over $600 million in 2017-18 and was approaching $1 billion in financial year of 2018-19 with a CAGR of 39.54 percent. It is expected to grow to $4.6- 4.8 billion by 2025. A significant portion of this export industry is in custom software development in for online services. Apart from the export market the domestic market for web application and thereby web development has been accelerating very fast. This is evident in the growing number of online services that are now coming to the market such as e-commerce sites, social networking sites and forums, business services etc. The corporate sector has also focused mainly on intranet based web solutions served by internal web servers or firewalled clouds. Overall this huge push towards web application has obviously led to a large pool of web developers and designers making Bangladesh an ideal destination for custom web development.
Strength of numbers
In a research piece done by Oxford Internet Institute Bangladesh came out only second to India in availability and scale of freelancers for software development (and also for cumulative skills). And majority of this large skill set is for web development work.
We could not find a similar study on the skills distribution on the current professional software developers in Bangladesh but even from informal discussions, marketing materials of BASIS members it can easily be assumed to be the main skill set they are offering. So it can safely be suggested that the cumulative total for freelancers and professionals for web development skills sets Bangladesh easily as one of the top 3 nations for web development outsourcing.
Breadth of skills
With a substantial pool of resources working on online solutions in thousands of local and international projects the breadth of skills is really large in Bangladesh. We experience this regularly when we search for resources for our projects, almost any web technology weather it is a very exotic Javascript library or brand new unheard of cloud technology there is always resources available. There are two major reasons for this, the first is the substantial freelancing projects that prepare students and junior resources for web technology from projects outsourced to them from all over the world. This exposes resources to new technologies and with a very low barrier to entry into freelancing projects (e.g. with sites like upwork.com or freelancer.com) students and graduates of CS programs around the country find access to such experience easy. This leads to tremendous growth in skills with a wide variety of web development skills.
The other reason for the breadth of skills is the current trend in higher education institutions in Bangladesh to include programs that are job ready (read: web development ready). Whereas most CS departments around the world would treat a course on web development or web design not crucial to it’s program, most CS programs in Bangladesh includes these topics. This is mainly for the “job readiness” need for the programs that students and the parents push for. In a recent study by ADB about the higher education programs for IT in Bangladesh found this correlation with industry.
This double power of numbers matched with breadth of skills makes Bangladesh a powerhouse for web software development projects. Kaz has been in the forefront of this move, with our first project in 2004 on ASP.NET (relatively new technology those days) we have worked on more than a hundred web applications in technologies as diverse as .NET, Python, Node.js, Java, PHP and even Perl. Web is one of our big focus area for skills development. We have also been some of the first companies to work on Azure or AWS working on early adopter projects for our customers. We are happy to keep this tradition of leading the industry in Bangladesh in this exciting area.
