Syria
Hiring Syrian programmers: what founders and CTOs should know
How to hire, evaluate, and retain Syrian programmers. Skills assessment, remote workflows, and the engineering culture.
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How to hire, evaluate, and retain Syrian programmers. Skills assessment, remote workflows, and the engineering culture.
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I have hired, fired, mentored, and been mentored by Syrian programmers for ten years. I have worked with engineers who could rebuild a Laravel kernel from memory and engineers who struggled with basic Git. The variance is wide, which means the hiring process matters more than the resume.
If you are a founder or CTO thinking about hiring programmers from Syria, here is what I have learned about finding the good ones, keeping them, and avoiding the common mistakes.
A typical Syrian programmer's resume lists every technology they have ever touched: Python, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript, Swift, Go, Rust. This is not dishonesty. It is survival. In an economy with limited job security, engineers learn whatever they need to learn to stay employable.
The signal you want is depth, not breadth. Ask for one project they are proud of, and drill into it. How did they handle authentication? How did they structure the database? What would they do differently if they rebuilt it today? The answers reveal more than any keyword list.
I do not do LeetCode. I do not do whiteboard algorithms. What I do is a 45-minute pair programming session on a real bug from one of our production systems. I share my screen, show the error, and ask the candidate to debug it with me.
This tests the things that matter:
The best Syrian programmers I have hired were not the ones who solved the fastest. They were the ones who asked the best questions.
If you are hiring programmers from Syria, you are hiring remotely. Even if the engineer is in Damascus and you are in Riyadh, you are still remote. The teams that succeed treat remote work as a first-class concern, not an afterthought.
This means:
Syrian programmers are not looking for Silicon Valley salaries. They are looking for stability. A contract that pays on time, every month, in a hard currency, is worth more than a 30 percent higher salary from a client who pays erratically.
Our standard compensation for a mid-level Syrian engineer is $1,200 to $2,500 per month, depending on experience and specialization. Senior engineers with production Flutter or Laravel experience command $3,000 to $5,000. These are below Gulf market rates but above regional averages, which is the sweet spot for retention.
The best way to retain Syrian programmers is not money. It is respect. Respect shows up in small ways:
We have had engineers stay with us for five years, through currency collapses and power outages, because the work was interesting and the team treated them like adults.
Hiring Syrian engineers directly is complicated by sanctions and banking restrictions. Most companies use one of three models:
We have used all three. The contractor model works for short-term projects. The UAE entity model works for long-term teams. The payroll service works if you have the budget and want zero compliance headaches.
Hiring programmers from Syria is not charity, and it is not a hack for cheap labor. It is a strategic choice to access a deep talent pool that has been tested by real constraints. The engineers who thrive in this environment are resourceful, self-directed, and surprisingly resilient. If you treat them well, they will build systems that outlast the companies that hired them.