Let us tell you
a story

Part I 🙂

Our software development centre in Sri Lanka is located in the town of Kurunegala. This is quite an unlikely location for companies of this nature. Almost all the other IT companies in Sri Lanka are based in the city of Colombo, which is the commercial capital.

Kurunegala has lots of talent. But, the lack of local work means they should commute to Colombo in search of jobs. Commuting one way takes roughly 3 hours.

This commute itself, despite its duration, is a nightmare given how crowded the office trains are and this surely sucks the productivity out of these people.

Despite all these, not many people want to move to Colombo as well. They find it too urban, too competitive and highly populated. Most people do not think of Colombo as the ideal place to raise their families.

Ishara, the founder of Creative Tribe, is from Kurunegala. He experienced this problem himself before migrating to New Zealand. What he used to do was go to Colombo on Monday morning, stay the week in Colombo and come back to Kurunegala on Friday evening. He only had the weekends to spend with his family. He had many colleagues who commuted daily because they wanted to be closer to their families.

He used to observe how unhappy the people were and how exhausted they were by the time they came into work. Their families are asleep by the time they leave homes and their kids are asleep by the time they get back. But, they did not have any other option rather than dealing with it. Ishara always thought of this as a problem that needed a solution.

Part II 🙂

A few years ago, Ishara received a job offer from a company in Auckland and therefore ended up moving to New Zealand. It turned out his employer had that job opening for a really long while but could not find someone locally to fill it. That is when they started looking internationally.

It was a very common occurrence to see people being “imported” from the rest of the world to New Zealand to fill roles in IT. Job openings had the tendency to stay open for such a long time before they got filled. Job adverts did not receive that many applications, at least not by the "Sri Lankan standards".

It was clear that this was a problem — there were not enough resources locally to match the demand.

Ishara saw this as an opportunity. Sri Lanka is a pool of IT talent. Not only these resources are talented, but the cost-of-living in Sri Lanka in comparison to that of countries like New Zealand and Australia makes these resources much cost-effective as well.

This is how our software development centre in Sri Lanka was born. Our mission is providing talented, cost-effective development resources to a market which does not have a supply to match its demand. We do this while bringing work to an area in Sri Lanka which otherwise does not have work of this nature.

Our resources now do not have to suffer through unfortunate commutes which deprive them of their productivity. They now get to spend lots more time with their families and this makes them happy. It goes without saying that happy people do good work!

Therefore, by working with us, you are actually helping us solve a problem of our own as well.

The foundation of our organisation is employee happiness.

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