Armand Jordaan

Armand Jordaan arrived in the Netherlands in January 2023, together with Anel. Read more about the story of Armand.

Armand, why did you emigrate to the Netherlands?
It has been both a professional and personal goal from an early age and why I became a software engineer. There is lots of opportunity in the European tech sector where you can learn a lot and attend many of the European tech conferences.

Can you tell us something how you do like the Netherlands?
Living in the Netherlands is not as simple as to pack up your bags and leave. You must learn a new language, culture, and customs. You are a guest in someone else’s country. This will require you as a South African to change your world view and how you conduct business. The Dutch are very straight forward and will speak their mind, a trait I personally appreciate. Getting started is a challenge but luckily summit developers was their every step of the way and can provide guidance and advice.

Please tell us something about the projects you are currently working on.
Originally starting as a senior software engineer working remote for OIG from South Africa and then moving into a technical lead role. The project is focused in the education sector to gather, analyze, and provide recommendations about student behavior within schools, colleges, and universities. The team is divided into the application team and data teams. The technology stack is Microsoft based on Azure, C#, MS-SQL, ASP.NET, Blazor, Docker, Power BI and DBT. The project is a migration project moving the survey portion of the system off .NET Framework and onto a modern clean architecture based on latest version of .NET, Blazor and Azure Container Apps. I am actively hiring and looking for full stack developers to join my team. Please do reach out to summit developers should you be interested.

Did the process of emigration go smoothly?
Most of the work is done in SA, get your unabridged documents sorted from home affairs as soon as possible and start saving. The rand to euro is not kind. The actual emigration process by going to the embassy for your appointment is blazingly fast. Completion of the application appointment and collection of passports we collectively spent 20min in total at the embassy in PTA. The team of summit developers did all the paperwork and applications, I highly recommend as an applicant you have all your documentation ready and respond to the team as fast as possible as when this process starts time is critical. If you are more than a 1-person household living on your own start selling your stuff as soon as possible we started 3 months before we left and still didn’t have enough time to get all our affairs in order. We also moved our two cats over with us using a pet relocation agency. In Barneveld there is a huge pet culture, and you will see people walking their dogs all the time. Emigration is probably one of the most stressful things you will do, and summit developers gave me the advice of not trying to do everything all at once instead do it one step at a time.

Can you explain to the South Africans who are considering to go overseas how you did experience the support from us?
I was fortunate enough to contact summit developers just in time for Matthijs’s last open interview slot in Johannesburg. Where he explained the entire process in detail, it was a few weeks after that where they had clients reach out for interviews, I conducted them and had availability to start immediately remote. Being a developer at summit developers you get access to a large network of developers and companies, with a training budget. summit developers is not like employers in SA and they do value their developers. Through out the emigration process summit developers was in constant contact, they assisted with securing an apartment, making sure we had a bed to sleep upon our arrival and depending on where you will be staying you can just order for next day delivery so setting up a home is super simple. Any non-work-related questions like where to buy stuff, South African equivalents and assist you with sim cards they got you covered.

Since the start of the process summit developers has been really going out of their way to assist us with the process. The town we live in, and our client have also been accommodating with many people speaking English. summit developers asks in return for being on time, doing your best possible work and integrate into society as fast as possible. If you are an Afrikaans speaker picking up Dutch does go faster but you need to put in effort to learn the culture and language. I look forward to meeting all my new colleagues and congratulations on taking the next big step😃