I was making 25,000 DA a month building WordPress sites. The company workflow was simple: find a cracked premium theme, install it on the client’s server, swap the logo, replace the placeholder text, and call it done. That was the entire process. No custom fields. No performance optimization. No real architecture. Just templates, repeated ten times a month.<\/p>\n
The owner studied French literature. At some point he learned enough WordPress to sell himself as a web expert \u2014 enough to close deals, not enough to actually engineer anything. I had a CS Master’s degree and couldn’t sell my way out of a coffee shop. So I sat at my desk, built my templated sites, and watched him close deal after deal using nothing but a solid pitch and zero technical depth. That’s when I understood: in the local market, marketing beats engineering every time.<\/p>\n
After about a year, I asked if I could take my own projects on the side. Small stuff, weekends, nothing that interfered with the company’s work. He said yes. So I started finding my own clients \u2014 building real sites from scratch, writing proper code, no cracked themes, no shortcuts.<\/p>\n
That’s when the dynamic shifted. Suddenly I wasn’t just the guy with the CS degree who builds things. I was a developer with my own client relationships and a growing reputation. Within weeks, he fired me. No notice, no severance. And because there was no formal contract \u2014 no registered employment, no papers \u2014 he didn’t pay my last month’s salary. 25,000 DA gone. Nothing I could do about it.<\/p>\n
The commission structure tells you everything about how the business was designed: 3% on any project under 200k DA, 5% on anything over. At 25k base, even a 300k DA project would only get me 15k in commission. The math doesn’t add up to a career \u2014 it adds up to a trap. You work harder, you earn slightly more, but you never earn enough to leave. And the moment you become valuable enough to threaten the owner’s position, you’re out.<\/p>\n
Around the same time, I took on an e-commerce client whose store was built on a cracked Woodmart theme. The site was falling apart \u2014 products wouldn’t load, orders were disappearing, the database was a mess of corrupted tables. I nuked everything and did a clean WordPress install from scratch. Then I migrated every product, every user, every order manually. Rebuilt the store properly with a lightweight setup that actually worked.<\/p>\n
The client got a functioning online store that finally converted. And that single project paid me more than three months at the template shop. Three months of templated work, replaced by one project where I actually engineered something.<\/p>\n
That was the moment the gap became obvious. The company I worked for wasn’t in the business of building good websites. They were in the business of selling illusions. The actual engineering was an afterthought \u2014 whatever was cheapest and fastest. The real skill wasn’t in the code. It was in convincing a client that a templated site was premium work worth premium money.<\/p>\n
This isn’t unique to one company. Most small WordPress shops in Algeria run the same playbook: no development background on the leadership side, no engineering standards, just marketing budgets and a catalog of pre-built themes. If you’re a developer with actual training and you start building your own reputation, you become a threat the moment you step outside their system.<\/p>\n
The structure is designed for that. No contracts means no leverage when things go wrong. Low base salary means you can’t build savings. Commission caps mean you can never earn enough to gain real independence while working for them. It’s not incompetence \u2014 it’s intentional. A developer who can walk away is a liability to a business model built on cheap template labor.<\/p>\n
The Algerian market has plenty of these shops. They exist because there’s demand \u2014 business owners need websites and don’t know the difference between a cracked theme and a custom build. The problem is that developers with real skills end up trapped in these environments, undervalued and blocked from growing, until they either burn out or get pushed out.<\/p>\n
I should have started building my own client base earlier. Not freelancing on company time, but investing in relationships and a personal brand before I needed the safety net. The mistake was treating job security as something an employer provides. In the Algerian dev market especially, job security is your own skill set and your own network. No one else is going to protect your career.<\/p>\n
I also should have pushed for a proper contract. It felt awkward \u2014 “we’re a small team, we don’t do papers” \u2014 but that informality is exactly what enables the exploitation. A contract protects both sides, but in practice it only matters when one side decides not to pay. And in an unregulated market where employment laws are rarely enforced, that happens more often than anyone admits publicly.<\/p>\n
The template shop model works for the owners. It generates cash with minimal technical overhead. But for developers, it’s a ceiling. You can’t sharpen your skills building sites that are already built. You can’t charge premium rates when your entire workflow is install-and-replace. And you can’t build a long-term career in a place that sees your growth as a threat.<\/p>\n
The moment you feel yourself outpacing your workplace, start quietly building your own infrastructure \u2014 your own clients, your own projects, your own name in the market. Not out of disloyalty. Out of survival. Because if you’re useful and cheap, they’ll keep you. But if you’re skilled and independent, they’ll treat you like competition.<\/p>\n
That’s not a reason to stay small. It’s a reason to make sure you never need their permission to grow.<\/p>\n
Build the skills, build the relationships, and build the exit before you need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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