U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent

https://restofworld.org/2022/latin-america-startup-developer-scarcity/

by braco_alva • 4 years ago

214 334 4 years ago

krasin2• 4 years ago

I am surprised that it took so long to realize that hiring people in the same time zone is better for productivity.

I am saying it as someone who spent N years working for an American company from Moscow (~11 hours difference) and had to sleep in the office frequently to get at least some things done (like, code reviews approved by the team members in the main office).

novok4• 4 years ago

We have been trying for years actually, there just isn't that many to hire as the article said :( There is a reason why all tech worker offices seem to be from east/west europe, china, india, USA and canada. Oracle has had offices in mexico for quite a while for example.

jorblumesea3• 4 years ago

Language/education/infrastructure barrier in Latin America, for some countries at least. Situation is improving as of late but a large skill gap both in terms of education and foreign lang skills (English). Hiring in India was painful for some reasons, but everyone spoke English and education was top level due to intense competition.

Most of Latin America is only roughly overlapping with US timezones. The western most countries (Ecuador for example) are basically EST time, but Brazil is closer to GMT.

krasin2• 4 years ago

I have a first hand experience working with a great team at Trinidad and Tobago. Maybe we got lucky in finding them, but I've got an impression that good universities exist and therefore there's a steady supply of capable new grads.

As for timezone, Trinidad and Tobago is EST+1, Lima (Peru) is EST, and Brazil is EST+2. That gives much more workday overlap than even Western Europe.

8note8• 4 years ago

Language/education/infrastructure are a lot easier to change that timezone, at least

88913527• 4 years ago

It's interesting to hear of requiring code reviews approved by the main office team. That's a strategy we've adopted on my team, and I got pushback for it. Good to hear that it's not out of the ordinary. The technical quality of the work is typically good, but oftentimes the domain knowledge isn't there due to the T+12 issue meaning little time for overlap.

gregdoesit• 4 years ago

It’s not just Latin America. It’s also Canada, most of Europe, it’s India, Asia, and I’m hearing Africa also experiencing a similar pull.

There’s a global talent shortage for experienced people in software engineering, and it’s spilling over everywhere.

Remote work becoming the norm thanks to the pandemic, plus the rise of services like Remote.com, Deel and similar ones is making it much easier to hire remotely in most countries - and hiring outside the US is easier and cheaper: especially when you pay above the local market (but we’ll below the US one).

I’ve been covering this trend from mid 2021 both in my newsletter (The Pragmatic Engineer) and my blog. From all evidence I gathered, we are in the most heated tech hiring market of all time, one that is hotter than during the Dotcom Boom (details in [1]).

Having talked with closer to a hundred tech hiring managers the last six months across all geographies, the consensus is that it will get worse in Q1 2022 than before - and, obviously, this means better for many experienced engineers. And H2 2021 was hot enough with out-of-cycle compensation increases of 5-30% on top of annual raises at many tech companies, across all geographies [2].

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-t...

[2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hi...

atlasunshrugged3• 4 years ago

Anecdata but in my experience it's definitely true in Africa, I did a project for a Cameroonian tech company recently and they couldn't afford to compete with major tech co's with remote roles which is where anyone decent and semi-senior went. They ended up with a mishmash tech team in Algeria and Ukraine mostly although they would have much preferred to hire local. I heard this story many times in the tech community there and in Kenya.

csomar4• 4 years ago

Same in Tunisia. Remote and France have swooped practically most of the tech talent. You are forced with either mediocre developers or to pay EU rates.

tinyhouse• 4 years ago

I think US salaries are more to do with it than anything else. It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. So they hire where talent is cheaper. It was obvious it will happen with remote work.

Clubber• 4 years ago

It's just not sustainable

I'm not sure if it's a sustainability issue or tactic to eek out every dollar possible given the landscape. I suspect it's the latter. I'll bet most don't do the leet code interviews for offshore developers though.

thatfrenchguy• 4 years ago

The US salaries force you to go in more competitive markets though and use your engineers better, because your costs are higher. Salaries in France have been 1/3 of US salaries forever, and yet people don't outsource to French engineers, more like French engineers move to the US.

colechristensen4• 4 years ago

I’ve been at and seen plenty of places where a growing layer of middle management was paying for itself by outsourcing engineers. Outsourced engineers very often need much more management and company directors either lose touch or decide to run the company in ways that justify raising their own salaries.

It’s not that the cost of engineers is unsustainable, it’s that aging companies tend to want to take power and decisions away from engineers towards management and accomplish this with outsourcing.

Accujack6• 4 years ago

It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies.

Translation: Most tech companies are addicted to cheap labor, either through exploiting new graduates or handing out potentially worthless stock options. They won't choose to reduce their profits regardless of what happens.

Very few startups "need" to hire less experienced people, mostly the ones that do just haven't got a viable business model. The ones that can't afford to hire the people they need at a reasonable salary for the work they expect shouldn't exist. They're just machines for turning venture capital into personal wealth for the founders as they exploit their employees then sell out.

syshum4• 4 years ago

>It was obvious it will happen with remote work.

Not to many, Many still believe that remote work for programmers simply means lower cost of living for them while keeping their high salaries...

They are about the learn the lesson US steal workers, and other blue collar works in many American industries did when globalization hit them....

devwastaken3• 4 years ago

This is exactly what university students in the U.S. and abroad have been faced with. Most engineers with a paycheck simply don't get the problem. Competition is higher now than ever for entry, companies do not want to hire graduates, they do not want to invest resources into them. They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project. We are racing to the bottom and the natural result is the U.S's software dominance will be gone sooner than later. Just like manufacturing we are seeing an exportation of work en mass.

jorblumesea3• 4 years ago

We're not really exporting work as much as hiring people to come over here. Or, it's not as clear cut as just exporting manufacturing.

thaumaturgy• 4 years ago

Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code.

If a student enters a collegiate program with some interest or experience in programming, then they're likely to come out of it with solid skills and find some opportunities. If an employer has the resources to select from the best that universities have to offer, then they can find great candidates.

But for us that aren't working for FAANG, a university degree doesn't really tell us much, and certainly tells us a lot less than a portfolio of projects or work experience.

This is still fundamentally a hiring problem. There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. A CS degree sure ain't it.

pantalaimon• 4 years ago

My first job was at a startup and they simply didn't have any money to hire experienced people, so it was petty much only people fresh from uni.

You see the same at other smaller companies who will rather hire a student or a fresh graduate because it's much cheaper (and more available).

chrisseaton5• 4 years ago

Racing to the bottom by paying talent more and more and more?

I feel like companies are investing even more in the long term than ever before, building increasingly ambitious infrastructure projects.

I don't see what you see at all.

holoduke• 4 years ago

I dont agree with your rather pesimistic view on the matter. I know many companies having fresh new graduates in their hire strategy because that just works in the long rong. Proven fact. Also most companies have smart people not shortsighted and they come up with proper long term strategies. There might be foolish companies as you describe but not the majority.

raz32dust• 4 years ago

This is not true. I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.

dvtrn• 4 years ago

They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project.

Not a graduate but instead an industry veteran. If what you say is accurate then Im happy to have my bias of “maybe it’s time I go the mercenary route” confirmed.

Surely the market is there, right?

scsilver2• 4 years ago

The talent abroad ends up working for US companies though, how will dominance dissipate. The market and financing is in the US.

Accujack6• 4 years ago

There’s a global talent shortage for experienced people in software engineering

No, there's not. There's a shortage of cheap experienced software engineers in the US.

no_wizard2• 4 years ago

The truth is that most software isn’t all that special. For the average business that can accelerate their processes with CRUD apps you don’t need to do much in the name of bespoke work. I can have a standard run of the mill CRUD app up in like a week or maybe if sufficiently complex a month or so - with proper tests. That’s the kind of work I’m seeing outsourced in droves typically.

The kind of work I actually do nowadays I don’t see getting outsourced so easily. This is core architecture and fundamental differentiation that the business sees as key to product and core success. You’d be highly unwise to outsource that.

An experienced developer that can produce high quality work but can accept a lower salary (nominal to local markets of the employer not the developer) based on geographical concerns? You can make a lot of money with those CRUD contracts I imagine

Edit: this all assumes someone competent is overseeing the work and someone that understands the technical things involved in the overall project to steer it know what they’re doing too

csomar4• 4 years ago

While simple CRUD apps are not technically challenging; the hard part of doing these is figuring out the specs and communicating with the client. I can see how this can go wrong with offshore clients (time difference, cultural difference, language difference, only remote). There could be a market for local agencies outsourcing tech work (and even that has to be done carefully). But clients directly outsourcing to off-shore agencies, that spell trouble.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

On the ground, this seems to be demonstrably false. I have numerous current and former coworkers that would love opportunities elsewhere.

It’s the recruiters who are the problem. If you’re looking for a C# dev and you put “5 years Node.JS experience minimum”, then not only are you going to miss out on some great, if not the best, developers, but you’re much less likely to hire the man you actually want.

reaperducer2• 4 years ago

I'd go further and say it's not just the recruiters that are the problem, but the automation of recruiting that is the problem.

Hiring is a people skill, not an algorithm skill.

faangiq2• 4 years ago

Reminder, every “talent shortage” is actually a wage shortage. Double those salaries and you’ll find plenty of talent.

scsilver2• 4 years ago

Yeah at this point, swe are more key to bringing in the future efficiency advancements per person than doctors or lawyers, I remember doctors making multiple hundreds of thousands a year decades ago, with surgeons into the millions. It seems reasonable that swe salaries surpass that as software eats everything and our ability to disseminate engineering Skill stagnate.

burntoutfire2• 4 years ago

Not neccessarily. Say there's 3 million competent senior software engineers in the US, and 75% of them are already working as senior SWEs (the remaining 25% are in early retirement or have switched professions). The best that doubling wages in short term can accomplish is makes those 25% of people move back to the profession.

As for people who don't know how to code retraining to be SWEs - since becoming a "senior software engineer" takes at least 5 years, you'd have to wait 5 years to see a result, irrespective of how much you increase the wages.

mooreds• 4 years ago

This is not actually entirely true (although I've had similar sentiments in the past).

The question is, how inelastic is supply? "Labor of a senior software developer" isn't like "a widget" in that you can pretty simply create more of them. It takes years and special training to create senior software developers.

This means the supply is inelastic over the short term, although in the long term more people get the education to become one.

That means that doubling salaries might not have the effect you predict.

RealityVoid3• 4 years ago

While, generally, that is a good solution, I think this is not true in this instance. Realistically speaking, SW people are paid very well relative to the average population. And you can't really just mint them on demand. Time to bring up to a SW dev is long. Since the pay is so high, I think most people who had the ability and interest are in SW already. So the supply is pretty much fixed. What would increasing pay do? Just heat up the market. They probably won't get more manpower in the market, but just poach from eachoter. Great for devs, bad for companies(stock holders? CEO? I don't know, modern companies are so nebulous and diffuse, I don't even know who is to gain from them) bottom line.

I posit that the "hot" market is the marker of inflation. The money running around leads to more competition for talents and competitive fields is where, I assume, inflation should show up most easily.

I know I might sound anti-worker, I swear I am not, I just attempt to get as close to the truth as my small mind allows me.

jandrewrogers2• 4 years ago

High wages do not manufacture talent. Spending more money won't allow every soccer team in the world to have a Lionel Messi on squad. There are a finite supply of most skill sets, which can be well below the total demand for those skill sets.

Companies don't want to hire generic software engineers, there is a huge demand for software engineering skill sets that are extremely difficult to learn, and which can only be acquired after years of diligent effort and experience. This is where the gap is and no amount of paying more will create a larger supply. Some software engineering expertise is already paying in excess of $1,000,000, and there are still severe shortages. That's not a "wage shortage" unless you expect me to believe that software engineers are choosing to grind away on ERP software for $150k instead.

The highest paying software engineering skill sets are the most difficult ones to fill. Software engineering skill sets are not fungible. The highest paid ones are often those with the least elastic supply.

refurb• 4 years ago

At the margins.

But let’s say there are 100 heart transplant specialists in the US getting paid $1M per year, but you need 200.

You can increase their wages as high as you want and you can’t create 100 of them out of thin air.

I’d suggest for highly technical roles, shortages can exist.

Unskilled or semi-skilled labor is a better fit for your statement.

vmception• 4 years ago

I’ve been doing that for 7 years.

They’re* only a little more expensive than India/Eastern Europe. There are enough good developers that speak English good or well enough, but the likelihood of being able to communicate nuanced topics or revisions is the same as anywhere, including US.

(*I literally don’t know which South American countries are committing code, just the hourly rate the firm passes to me)

pevey• 4 years ago

"Brain Drain" has been a thing for years. I can remember in the late 90s in my Developmental Econ class my Peruvian professor complaining of brain drain from Latin America and how loss of top tier talent affected economic growth. We all appreciated the irony since she herself was a part of the issue she complained about, having studied and taught in the US for quite some time as she was standing up there saying this to us. But I could see her point.

atlasunshrugged3• 4 years ago

Yeah, it's really interesting but also a huge economic opportunity for countries if they can figure out enough reforms without these people to make the country attractive enough that these people come back with all their experience (and networks) and help boost the economy even further.

bobthepanda2• 4 years ago

Yup. Initial foreign investment in China was mostly driven by Hong Kong and Taiwan (many of these investors were first or second-generation from the mainland), and other parts of the Chinese diaspora.

cblconfederate4• 4 years ago

Unless these people start building companies in said countries this does not benefit the countries. They re essentially tourists

raziel2p• 4 years ago

Do you think she didn't realize the irony herself? It's not a negative against her person anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with complaining about or arguing against a system you're taking part of and/or benefiting from.

dirtyid• 4 years ago

Wonder how WFH brain drain where talent stays in their respective countries shake things up. At least keeps some money and expertise circulating in the local economies. Also going to be interesting when Chinese academic institutions start climbing the ranking charts and training foreign talent who has no long term prospects in immigration unfriendly PRC. Perhaps a future where more "sea turtles" return to develop home countries after than be permanently brain drained in the west.

pid-1• 4 years ago

In the past brain drain meant good professionals would leave their countries to live in the US or Europe.

Nowadays, with remote work, people are being paid handsomely and spending their money in their home countries.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing that happening a lot with dev friends in Rio de Janeiro. People are using money earned in the US to help the local economy. They still interact with local universities and contribute to local projects. Cool stuff.

kgran• 4 years ago

Also causing the prices in some sectors, such as real estate, to raise abnormally.

cblconfederate4• 4 years ago

In the long term though this is not good for the home countries, they are left behind and at best become tourist destinations. There is no country that pulled itself forward this way, not even with remote work. Eastern europe is an example with very low growth rates since the fall of communism.

pibefision• 4 years ago

No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some information about the topic.

99_00• 4 years ago

People underestimate cultural difference and even pretend they don't exist.

Even within a culture there are people who don't fit into the dominant cultural values and way of working. A big part of diversity and inclusion is addressing that.

This becomes an even bigger problem when dealing with other cultures.

And you might find that other cultures don't value diversity and inclusion as much as n American corporate culture and really look down on the way others do things and see there way as the right way.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

Is diversity and inclusion addressing this?

For example Eastern Europe is getting a lot of outsourcing. Yet there’s zero d&i initiatives targeting that region.

Same goes for Africa. I’ve seen zero d&i initiatives To better integrate those living in Africa.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Hiring from around the globe is tautologically increasing diversity.

novok4• 4 years ago

Having worked with people in remote latin american offices, the cultural gap isn't as extensive than the other ones actually. The barrier is purely a lack of numbers in this case.

The tech industry is VERY used to working with people from multiple cultures and backgrounds. Teams where people are immigrants from 5 different countries is fairly common.

georgeburdell• 4 years ago

This becomes an even bigger problem when dealing with other cultures.

I have worked with many in Latin America (Costa Rica and Mexico in particular) and cultural differences (with respect to work) have never come up. They seem extremely "Americanized", or perhaps the differences aren't there in their own native cultures either. It's like talking to an American with a slight accent.

And you might find that other cultures don't value diversity and inclusion as much as n American corporate culture and really look down on the way others do things and see there way as the right way.

Unless they have a proclivity for wearing red hats or being out of the house Sunday mornings [0]. U.S. diversity & inclusion amounts to parading around people with different skin colors that think exactly like a West Coast White Liberal.

[0] Tongue-in-cheek reference: Silicon Valley, Season 5, Episode 4

nestorD3• 4 years ago

That is great! Latin american are still suspiciously uncommon in tech so there is definitely a neglected talent pool.

That illustrates one of the few good traits of capitalism: discrimination pushing you to miss on good candidates (women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, etc) is a drop in profit that can be exploited by other companies and that, thus, should disapear with time (at least in theory, in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists...).

WanderPanda• 4 years ago

I would love if more people would see it this way. If the discrimination is so strong they should found a company, hire all the discriminated people and profit.

Latour• 4 years ago

There was a HN submission awhile back about a Dev in Japan who did this very thing. Hiring people such as college dropouts, or older women, who have higher expectations of being stay at home moms in Japan.

e4e78a062• 4 years ago

If your hypothesis was true then we'd see all the DEI initiatives and blatantly illegal diversity platforms like Canvas [1] have paid off by now. But that isn't the case.

[1] https://www.canvas.com/

nestorD3• 4 years ago

Yes, that's the "in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists" part.

brandonmenc• 4 years ago

Disappointed to see no mention of Costa Rica.

At my last company, about half of our dev team was from CR and they kicked ass. They got rid of the army in 1948 and redirected the funds into education, transforming it into a high tech hub.

pevezzac• 4 years ago

FWIW, Microsoft is hiring in Costa Rica. More specifically the M365 Core team. I work with a few of Costa Ricans.

plumeria• 4 years ago

There's also Intel and Amazon. I wonder if/when more tech companies will eventually set up offices in CR. They'd be very welcome and could get some tax benefits establishing in a free zone, for example.

beebeepka• 4 years ago

Intel used to build their best chips in Costa Rica. Sorry for the useless trivia.

novok4• 4 years ago

IMO I really want tech companies to start hiring in latin america more just for time zone reasons. If India & China was in south america a lot of the pain of having offices from those regions would go away.

I've even done several hiring intensives for people from there 3 or 4 years ago.

ashtonkem• 4 years ago

As someone who works on west coast time, it’s easy for me to forget that Latin America is largely east of the continental US. Not an issue for remote work, but something that caught me off guard when I started working with people living in that continent.

novok4• 4 years ago

Yes that is true, I even worked in brazil with a west coast team for a couple weeks. But it's wayyyyyyyyy better than europe, india or china time zones.

tootie• 4 years ago

I've worked with partners in Colomba, Costa Rica, Argentina. There's a lot of talent for sure. My last place had a bid back office in Colombia, but it seemed like we were already running up against market capacity even a few years ago and competition for talent was heating up. The pay scales are already much higher than Asia.

VectorLock• 4 years ago

Wheres a good place to find "DevOps"/SRE type people in the EST timezone in LatAm?

bkovacev5• 4 years ago

I have been trying to get US companies to hire from Eastern Europe (mainly south eastern europe). My company would act as a middleman (essentially outsourcing), pay money to the devs which would work directly 1:1 for that company. The devs would be working for us, yet, we would not manage their day to day activities - we'd just act as an HR/recruiting/legal middleman. I have tried with two major outsourcing companies, yet, they were never that interested. For 100-120k a year, you could get top tier devs with 6-8+ years of experience from Eastern Europe.

ng12• 4 years ago

I've done something like this. It worked well with the caveat that even when working as FTEs most Eastern European devs still preferred to work like contractors, e.g. "tell me exactly what to build and I'll build it". It worked best when pairing a senior engineer in the US or Western Europe with a team of 2-3 devs in Eastern Europe.

bkovacev5• 4 years ago

True and fair point! I have been trying to change that mindset for a while. One major thing I believe is the uncertainty of contracting - they never know when they may not be needed again. However, if an EE dev can align himself with the company and has a senior dev / manager above him who can help him make that transition - I think they'd make a great team.

yuliyp• 4 years ago

It's a bit of a confusing niche you're trying to fill. Outsourcing firms are generally providing the HR/recruiting/legal role as their specialty. That they wouldn't want to provide another company a cut when they can do this just fine themselves is unsurprising.

bkovacev5• 4 years ago

True, it's a hard niche to fill, and yup, slightly confusing even. We'd aim for development companies within the US that have some "outsourcing" presence around the world, but have not tapped into Eastern Europe yet. What we're really looking to do is help developers get connected to the US companies and get paid better and not be looked at as contractors, but FTE with benefits.

An example - in Serbia and Slovenia you arrange a net salary, and the company pays the taxes/insurance etc on top of net salary (usually around 50-60%). So for a senior salary in Serbia of around 4k euros. you're looking at the company paying around 6-7k euros. For a contractor (as a sole proprietor) you can make at most 50k euros a year and then you pay benefits that are minimum 300e. If you go above that you pay 10% tax on profit + 15% personal income tax. You can choose to still pay yourself salary and 50-60% on top of that, and you will most likely not pay yourself a big salary, but take the profit and pay the 15%.

What we would try to accomplish is:

- Not have developer as a contractor, but as an FTE

- Create a pipeline of US based companies

- Bump the salary for devs for 25%-30% -> pay the taxes/pension (30k+ more)

- Take a 15% of the annual salary (20-30k)

- Provide cheap senior/staff/principle devs that are cheaper than the same devs, but same or similar quality

spamizbad2• 4 years ago

My company uses Eastern European contractors for certain projects as "staff augmentation". Overall, I would say our experience is positive. There are indeed many experienced devs who do great work. But it does have some drawbacks:

1) 10-hour time difference between West Coast US and, say, Kyiv is pretty big. It's easier on EST people, but on the US side you're going to have to plan on jamming your calendars full of meetings between 7:30-10:30am.

2) Because you have fewer "business hours" between two, you need product, project, and engineering management to operate in a fairly well-oiled manner with more stuff spelled-out up-front, otherwise your team across the pond is stuck until the next day for some answer. Also, if your org even attempts to adopt "agile" this communication breakdown will murder your velocity; you're better off doing Waterfall.

3) They cannot be on-call to troubleshoot product issues during US business hours. This makes the business-side uneasy

4) Higher churn-rate than domestic engineers. Mostly over salary; this falls squarely at the feet of the "middleman" who undercuts their engineers. We attempt to ameliorate this by giving them feedback on employees who they should focus on retaining but IME they just view their talent as widgets rather than craftsmen. I've seen several good devs leave over money we'd have gladly paid them but their contracting org refused.

5) Speaking of higher churn rate: Onboarding can be more painful, again because of the TZ difference as well as certain cultural issues.

None of these are deal-breakers. But it's easy to understand why a company might be willing to pay 50-100% more to avoid these concerns.

atlasunshrugged3• 4 years ago

Somewhat unrelated but just a side comment, many Ukrainian folks are really trying to move away from the spelling of Kiev as you did, instead they prefer Kyiv (I was corrected several times for this by Ukrainian friends/colleagues when I got to the region so just thought I'd share).

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...

bkovacev5• 4 years ago

1) Absolutely - I have been working for the US companies as an FTE (remotely, but C2C, essentially a contractor), and sometimes the hours do make an issue. It's a 9 hour difference with the West Coast for me, but Central / Eastern works well, if the expectations are properly set.

2) Spot on - Agile does not work well in such environment, I have seen it first hand twice. I feel that with senior/staff level devs, you can expect and should get higher level of autonomy and less hand-holding, so in a solid project oriented company, I do feel that fewer "business hours overlap" would impact much. I do feel that at least 3, preferably more hours should be reserved for meetings / overlap.

3) I'd argue about that one, haha. I have been on-call troubleshooting production at 2-3am my time, not once, but multiple times. For a great employer, with proper compensation and benefits, you'd be surprised what devs from this area would do!

4) YES! Companies are greedy. However, they do have to pay pension/insurance on the hourly rate they give to the dev, think 50-60%, but they don't want to give away their cut at all, it seems to be non-negotiable flat fee, which is deal breaking. Another point is that Microsoft and other big brand outsourcing names are coming to EE and stealing away the workforce.

Disclaimer - I work as a senior/staff level dev with high base salary and equity, so my experience may be a bit skewed.

Tehchops• 4 years ago

I know the experience varies, but I've seen nothing but trouble from hiring devs from EE.

bkovacev5• 4 years ago

Absolutely - every experience matters. In Southeastern Europe - you get what you pay for. We would definitely not try to hire anyone with less than 5 years of experience, thoroughly vetted before even talking to the US companies and/or submitting a resume.

tartoran4• 4 years ago

It could be trouble hiring remote workers anywhere if no due dilligence is done properly. I worked with both EE and Indians and it was okay. Folks did their job decently, they were paid less (but also didn’t have to take all the bullshit open office, noise and fractal like work hours interrupted by interminable meetings.

12700180802• 4 years ago

Is anyone here concerned about an eventual "great salary reset" driven by remote work? Companies don't need to cover Bay Area CoL because they can get people from the midwest to do the work, so avg salaries go down. Then, they can get Canadians to do the work, avg salaries go down again. Then, they'll get Chilean software engineers to do the work, and avg salaries go down even more.

In the short term, we're having a fun little arbitrage event by working remotely with the top salaries, but why would that continue to last in 5+ year timeframes? Of course if you like in person work it won't be an issue, but I don't plan on being in an office for the rest of my life.

Hermitian9092• 4 years ago

I think it will vary based on where you are in the talent pool. Tech talent distribution is tri-modal [0]. The demand for the kind of people who can comfortably be part of the rightmost peak (and even moreso, its right tail) is increasing rapidly. As tech gets better the leverage high performance individuals have gets bigger, not smaller.

I'm less hopeful for people in the leftmost peak or middle peaks. For decades tech has been slowly eating its low-end. Think of all the webmasters of the 90s made obsolete by sites like Squarespace, the work has more or less been completely deskilled. I think that trend will continue.

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

12700180802• 4 years ago

I feel like that article just affirmed my position though. An Uber job that would've been $400k in SF is now $250k in NL. You might think "Wow Group 3 is growing, good for us workers," but the absolute peak of Group 3 is falling.

the_gipsy• 4 years ago

Sell that million dollar Bay Are house and move somewhere better but less expensive. Don't worry.

syshum4• 4 years ago

In the 90's they said "learn the code" when globalization costs people their jobs I thought that response about ignorant...

However this new method of just "move" is even more ignorant, you can not move your way in to a low enough cost of living to compete with nations that pay below US min wages.... This is doubly true when there is a huge push to increase those minimum wages...

So Learn to code from the 90's has become if you do not like it leave... nice

jjeaff• 4 years ago

While having more supply will definitely lower rates, I think there has been a lot of pushback on lowering salaries for people who decide to move to lower col areas. Enough pushback that I have heard of several big companies reversing that policy.

hammock• 4 years ago

How can I help my company recruit better in Latin America? Is an outside agency the only way?

threefiftyone2• 4 years ago

You can try and directly approach people from LATAM. Find workers from great local tech companies and send them messages through LinkedIn

ironmagma4• 4 years ago

I worked for a company that did this. It was (and still is) a complete disaster. They've been around for 5 years and still haven't released a product. If you're going to do this, you'd better have an enormous pile of tasks that can be independently handled and programmatically verified. And just assume that communication between your US team and foreign teams will be nonexistent, it's best to set expectations low instead of trying to embed people into existing teams.

vanusa• 4 years ago

And I worked for a company where it worked beautifully; the remote folks (who were very carefully picked) meshed perfectly with the team (and better than many of the native folks).

It's an eternal topic on HN of course. Whether it works or not seems to depend on multiple factors (not simply language issues, or remote versus local), in my view.

ironmagma4• 4 years ago

Yeah, several things my (former) company did that made it worse:

- Not consult with existing employees before making this decision to see if we were on board.

- Not hire individually, instead acquire an entire company.

- Said company was struggling financially (which made it a "good deal").

xunn00263• 4 years ago

You company basically did everything wrong.

Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.

ironmagma4• 4 years ago

The point was not to say that hiring remotely is a fraught endeavor, it was a cautionary tale to any execs out there who might get it in their head that this is generally a good idea. It can go very very wrong.

Zaskoda• 4 years ago

I saw this first hand last Spring when I was visiting family in Mexico. One of my sister's friends there is a web developer and we really hit it off. A native born Mexican, he told me about how he works for a tech company out of Utah, but through a locally owned company. He then went on to explain that this is the nature of his entire company and that this is a popular trend in the industry there. I honestly couldn't be happier for them, not sure he could have made that good of a living doing only local work.

badrabbit• 4 years ago

Not just hiring, I've been asked to move there last year. It's the new "outsource to india"

jviotti2• 4 years ago

I think this article underestimates the difficulty of finding great talent in Latin America as a remote company. Everybody in Latin America wants to work remotely at foreign companies, yet few actually do in practice.

I was born and raised in Argentina, but studied and worked abroad (UK) and never was in the Latin American market. As an Engineering Lead at a London-based startup, I interviewed tons of software engineers who were applying remotely from all over South America and Central America. However, we didn't hire more than a bunch of Latin American engineers compared to dozens of Europeans and North Americans. The skill gap was pretty noticeable.

I've observed similar things with friends/family in South America which are into engineering. They find it very hard to be qualified enough to get offers from remote companies/startups.

soneca6• 4 years ago

I worked as a software developer in one company in Brazil and in three American companies. The skill gap was non-existent. I could see the same level of talent in both places.

reese_john• 4 years ago

What kind of companies in Brazil though? I feel like the level of brazilian engineers outside high growth tech companies is very low. Most of them will literally fail "Fizz-Buzz" style coding tests. Good devs are either making a very good salary in Brazil (30-50k USD) or 2-3X that working remotely for an American company

Daishiman2• 4 years ago

If you're a good engineer in Latin America you're not settling for less money than your first-world counterparts.

Argentina and Brazil's engineering talent is _outstanding_, and these people are not settling for mediocre companies or mediocre salaries.

jviotti2• 4 years ago

Exactly. The key is being a great engineer, and there are great engineers everywhere. I guess my point is that at least anecdotally, average engineers in Latin America are notably beyond average engineers in Europe and North America.

obblekk• 4 years ago

I wonder if the reverse is also true, or if we're about to see white collar wages in the US get crushed.

On the one hand, American workers now have the ability to work for more companies, including outside the US. On the other hand, there are a lot more people outside than inside, and far fewer large firms outside than inside, so off-shoring could be net negative for American workers.

I wonder if we're about to see protectionism expand from blue collar politics into white collar politics.

atomicnumber3• 4 years ago

To be honest, I think if most HN-type people want to be worried about threats to their salaries, the heartland is where to worry about. Making 60k/yr with a 4yr CS degree is extremely normal and it's a bit odd because you start high (for the region, I mean) but then the salary for an engineer with 25 years of experience (??) is only 150k.

And there's a lot of solid, affordable schools in the heartland too. So with only a 1-2 hour TZ difference regardless of which coast your main offices are in, you get employees that cost 10-25% as much but are culturally and logistically extremely similar.

Also worth noting, on the topic of culture, that while the heartland votes red, it's mostly just because of how the counties work. Most of the population is still fairly liberal, especially the portion with a college degree. And programmers are usually the liberal anarchy types anyway, on top of that.

mwcampbell• 4 years ago

Also worth noting, on the topic of culture, that while the heartland votes red, it's mostly just because of how the counties work.

I don't know about that. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and I've lived here most of my life (apart from a little over three years in the Seattle area while working at Microsoft). I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, and my parents have voted Republican for as far back as I remember. I rejected both their religion and their politics in my early 30s, but IMO, I did some of my best programming work before that. So if remote work really takes off, you might be surprised.

Addendum: I did get a college education, but it was from Wichita State University; for reasons having nothing to do with religion or culture, I was slow to leave home. So maybe I'm just an outlier that adds nothing worthwhile to this discussion.

Wiseacre• 4 years ago

Quite a few confederate flags still fly in relatively urban/suburban Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. So not quite as liberal as you think.

KptMarchewa3• 4 years ago

I wonder if we're about to see protectionism expand from blue collar politics into white collar politics.

You already have high protectionism of white collar since ~2015 or 2016, when chance of getting H1B outside of wholesale Indian consultancies became very low.

yftsui• 4 years ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727

Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

My success with outsourcing some work to Latin America has been much, much, much more successful than outsourcing to India and other places in Asia for the following reasons:

1. As the article points out, being in the same/similar timezones is huge. With so many folks working remotely anyway, it's much easier to integrate these developers as part of the team. They join standups, we can have easy back-and-forths in Slack, etc. The timezone difference to India makes this virtually impossible, so that if you ARE outsourcing to India the model is totally different and you have to outsource a very different type of work. Plus, since the time zones are so off, the situation sucks for everyone - someone is either staying up very late or getting up very early. These days I refuse jobs where coordination with India is required, because it's just not worth sacrificing other parts of my life for it, especially when it's easy to get a job where this is not necessary.

2. In general, I have found there to be less of a cultural issue of Latin American developers proactively speaking up and letting us know concerns/potential issues than their Indian counterparts. One of the biggest issues we had many years ago is that, while we hired developers in India that were fantastic technically, they were loath to inform us of problems or schedule slip until it was too late; in general, there was a culture of "over-deference" which proved to be extremely detrimental. If anyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, it was very similar to what he discusses about Korean Airlines' cockpit culture.

pcurve• 4 years ago

I tend to agree with you having worked with IBM's global consulting services and their workforce in both India and Brazil many moons ago.

While in theory, it may sound like you could have around the clock hands-on-keyboard time by having folks in India, it's more advantageous to have people work in similar time zone if it is joint development work.

I do have to say, when there are important soccer matches though, developers in Brail were... a bit harder to reach. no joke. lol.

SwiftyBug2• 4 years ago

I do have to say, when there are important soccer matches though, developers in Brail were... a bit harder to reach. no joke. lol.

This is absolutely true during a World Cup

tambeb• 4 years ago

I went to Brazil with some friends for the World Cup in 2014. For the bigger, more important matches the entire country left work early and everything (except for bars, etc.) closed down for the day. Quite literally.

coredog64• 4 years ago

The difference between IST and any US hours is my current pain. I have to get up at 5am (and sometimes even 4am) for a meeting that still requires the developers in India to stay late. I get maybe 2 hours of overlap, and everything else has to happen via async email.

In the past, we worked with HP's consulting arm, and they moved us to their Costa Rica workforce because time zones matched up better. I think both sides were happier on that.

8note8• 4 years ago

Having to support every timezone is my biggest pain. Occasionally Europe, occasionally India, occasionally china, occasionally eastern US.

Multiple meetings with random times between 0Z and 24Z in the same day makes it hard to plan on when to sleep.

lazyant• 4 years ago

while I agree with what you are saying, Gladwell's example may not be very good http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-...

stickfigure• 4 years ago

That article... doesn't seem very compelling? It seems like a bit part of the thesis is KAL's planes getting shot down by Soviets doesn't reflect badly on the pilots. I personally see "flying into terrain" and "flying into a war zone" as fairly interchangeable concepts, just with different survival probabilities.

ct0• 4 years ago

Time zones don't matter as much s youd think. Most of my oversees vendors are working the equivalent of 2nd and 3rd shifts and prefer not to have earlier meetings as they aren't working yet. It surprised me too.

investinwaffles• 4 years ago

My own experiences are identical to yours. Not 90%, not 99%, 100% identical.

soneca6• 4 years ago

” If someone is very money-driven, there’s nothing we can do.”

I am very far from “very money-driven”. I worked for a long time in the non-profit sector that would pay much less than mostly any of my other careers options. Then I changed to software development.

I work for an American company from Brazil. I earn 5 times more (after taxes) that what I would likely earn in a local well-paying company for my level of experience. 3 times if I was lucky and good at negotiation.

And think that is 3 times multiplication of already high-paying job. So it is a LOT of money. There is just not much a company can do around here until the demand for tech talent in the US decrease a little.

SwiftyBug2• 4 years ago

Am Brazilian, used to work in a very big, well-paying company. It's astounding the amount of amazing talent that left the company during the 2 years I worked there (myself included [not that I'm amazing talent, I just got lucky]). There's no way Brazilian companies can keep up with the talent evasion going on in tech right now, specially because of the exchange rate of USD x BRL.

wyclif2• 4 years ago

They're just going to have to bite the bullet and pay more. It really is that simple. If they can't find developers, they aren't paying enough and are trying to cheap out on talent acquisition.

kache_2• 4 years ago

There's a company called Auth0, which was comprised of mostly Argentinians. They did quite well for themselves, they got bought out by Okta for 6b.

vivab0rg2• 4 years ago

There's a very inspiring interview with the co-founder on the Changelog podcast. Highly recommended!

Changelog Master Feed: Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition (Founders Talk #78) https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78

kache_2• 4 years ago

Eugenio is super cool, got to meet him in person. Check out his blog https://eugeniopace.org/

ryanSrich2• 4 years ago

I’ve been hiring engineers from pretty much any country for the better part of a decade. It still blows my mind that companies are just figuring this out now.

It’s not just contractors either. With tools like remote.com, you can hire FTEs almost anywhere.

There is no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of adaptable companies.

I’ve been preaching this for years, but the new way is here. It’s all about async, 100% remote, no HQ, no excessive hiring, no in person meetings, no or limited meetings in general. Pay your staff 20% more than what they’d normally get and they won’t complain about not having ping pong or after work bonding events. Trust me it works.

cblconfederate4• 4 years ago

But why do all these companies have to be in america? One often hears about companies hiring remotely, but hardly ever establishing remotely.

ryanSrich2• 4 years ago

Not sure! I encourage people to travel as much as possible. Start companies wherever you want. The internet provides almost unlimited resources to do this. There’s really no excuse why you have to be in the US, or start in the US. Start wherever you want.

atleta3• 4 years ago

Well, I guess most of these have been in existence for a while. Also, as an American founder, why would you establish it anywhere but there? The idea is that you make money there (or make money globally, which is still easier starting from there) and hire remotely. Which is going to be cheaper. Or you get better talent for the same salary, which is another way to put it. So the company being from a developed market (could be Western Europe too) is an important part of the equation.

achow2• 4 years ago

To be close to customers?

kragen31• 4 years ago

The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America's tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying. Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.

Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.

For example, here in Argentina, you are required to convert your earnings immediately into pesos at the official rate, which is half the real rate. That's pillaging. In effect this is a 50% export tariff, used not to provide government services but to subsidize importation and travel abroad for rich Argentines, making most exportation wildly unprofitable; programming services have low enough costs that they can still remain afloat, at least until the programmers move abroad, but any export business with a substantial cost of sales is unviable. Bitcoin is a common way for such developers to get paid here in Argentina. I don't know about other countries.

Argentina has a strong crab-bucket or zero-sum mentality, justified by the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people, so as long as the government can direct attention to the exporters instead of the importers, there's strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.

It's probably true that people like López Conde can get away with paying their employees 20% of the market rate as long as those employees don't speak English --- but probably not for very long. Spanish is the most-spoken second language in every state in the US, and in New Mexico where I grew up half the population speaks it.

vivab0rg2• 4 years ago

I'm a half-retired Argentinian developer still living in Argentina. I second the parent comment 100%

brezelgoring• 4 years ago

the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people

Is this a symptom/cause of the crab-bucket mentality? It is here in Uruguay, as well, and I hold it myself, to my own detriment.

Is there a name for this? I want to read about it and see if I can change my mind, grow a bit.

Thank you

hashimotonomora• 4 years ago

It’s interrelated. It’s part resentment, part mediocrity, part laziness.

If the only way the rich got rich is by screwing over people, then I’m justified in not working hard, not being ingenuous, not being diligent because what good does it make anyway.

kragen31• 4 years ago

I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they are evil, in which case it's an effect.

(Negative feedback systems in general do this weird interchange of cause and effect. An op-amp's inputs are kept at the same voltage because they're its inputs. It's a real mindfuck, in a good way.)

More generally, throughout history, most people who got rich did get that way by screwing over other people; I mean that's literally how warfare works, by harming the opposing forces enough to get them to submit, and in feudal systems (and quasi-feudal systems like the Argentine system) that's how you gain power and wealth. Feudal nobles and partisan politicians are whoever was historically best at harming the opposing forces. Most of human history isn't that, of course, because everyday life always works by cooperation and goodwill, but most of the parts of history that got written down were people competing to hurt each other.

The crab-bucket mentality is very helpful to politicians because it prevents upstart businesses (and regions, and cities) from creating alternative centers of power that could compete with the established order.

Capitalism was the decisive break with that tradition, in which people compete by doing the most good for their customers instead of harm to whoever their enemies are at the moment; but nothing in capitalism prevents powerful and rich people from hurting whoever they see as their opposition, except that it's unprofitable to spend too much on hurting them, and if you choose poorly they may be able to hurt you back, which is even more unprofitable. And whoever is powerful can use that power for harm, too, and being human, they usually do. Still, by changing the criterion for wealth from doing harm to doing good, capitalism changed the incentives enormously.

snovv_crash• 4 years ago

Another name for it is Tall Poppy Syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

lvass• 4 years ago

That's part and parcel of deep, amalgamated, problems our countries suffer from. I receive in crypto, live in south america and still sleep worry-free. I just do a good job and happen to heap benefits from all this shit we're immersed in (ridiculous low prices for everything) and from working for a rich country. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, no matter how deep I look. I don't even worry about how my countrymen see this, I simply don't have a reason to tell them. Creating reliable and safe systems is the one talent I have, I might as well concentrate on that and leave political issues to those capable of grasping them.

kragen31• 4 years ago

What country, if you don't mind asking? Do a lot of other people there also get paid in cryptocurrency?

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

How do you convert your crypto to local currency?

MadSudaca2• 4 years ago

The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s pervasive in all LA. I’d dare to say it can be found in Spain/Portugal as well.

zozbot2342• 4 years ago

Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.

kragen31• 4 years ago

I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's property in order to improve their own situation involves all three of those mortal sins. (To be fair, running a successful business involves a certain amount of covetousness, too.)

Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers, not creators or merchants. Even today in Argentina it's considered far nobler to be an escribano or a lawyer than a physicist, a programmer, or a businessman --- but the real national heroes are football players! Pure zero-sum players.

Physicians are at least somewhat honored, but Favaloro still committed suicide because of the lack of support for his work, and Diego Maradona is far more honored for cheating at football and raping teenagers (and, to be fair, playing football too) than Esteban Maradona is for his lifetime spent on eradicating Chagas disease and studies in anthropology and biology.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona

oblio3• 4 years ago

For companies it's one thing, but for governments it could be different.

If your schooling was free, then to some degree you do "owe" working locally in order to give something back for that.

Of course, if it's not part of an agreement you signed before you started your studies or they don't enforce it, then I guess that's that.

kragen31• 4 years ago

I do think people should pay their taxes in order to fund the next generation of universal prenatal medical care, education, etc., but having them work for local companies for 20% of the market rate means they only have 20% as much income to tax, so we can only fund 20% as much education and medical care. You might think this would be compensated by vastly increased profits for the companies, but it isn't, because the low wages mean it's profitable to set people to work on low-value projects.

So, no, I don't think people "owe" working locally. If they owe anything in exchange for free education, it's realizing their full human potential and being generous with their time and money.

Now, go donate to Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, so the next generation can have free education not only in Argentina but everywhere in the world that it's legal.

markdown• 4 years ago

Poaching would be the more correct word to use.

kragen31• 4 years ago

That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.

vmchale• 4 years ago

The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America's tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying. Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.
Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.

There are salary differences w.r.t. Europe and the US as well but no one uses such language.

kragen31• 4 years ago

The salary differences are smaller, in large part because the governments have taken very different policies over the last century. Latin American governments are, by and large, continuing with the policies that have been producing economic disasters throughout that century, though Argentina is among the worse cases.

Also, though, the US does have a history of actually pillaging Latin American countries. Like, with soldiers. By contrast, the last time the US invaded Europe there was a surprising lack of pillaging.

myth2018• 4 years ago

It is, more than EVER, time to return to SIMPLICITY. As it's been said, most applications aren't that special and shouldn't demand overly specialized developers. Much like it used to be during back in the day, the old times of xBase languages and other contemporary technologies. Even though, nowadays even a simple CRUD app is expected to have "improved" UX, modern UI, mobile support, front and backend developers and other unnecessary intricacies which adds to overall projects costs while adding zero value to end-products. That has to stop and the conditions for ending this collective self-delusion are better than ever.

i_like_waiting2• 4 years ago

Market is stupid crazy right now. My coworkers are leaving because of 2x base offers, we did hiring recently, shortly after we sent an offer we noticed that CV is probably totally made up (inconsistent with Linkedin completely - different companies, different time periods) So instead of 4YoE we are getting 1YoE.

I wanted to rescind the offer, but my manager told me to give her chance, because of the market (lets see how she will do for first month).

I already received 2x base offer elsewhere as well, I will probably reject it, as I think I can get even more.

ddorian43• 4 years ago

Please describe numbers. Your "2x base offer" can still probably be very small. Example: is 2x +140K ?

i_like_waiting2• 4 years ago

yeah, its from £35k to £70k, nothing that breathtaking, but significant for me

tbrock• 4 years ago

Id love to hire some Latin American developers for my team. Any pointers on how to find them? Do folks go through outsourcing firms or try to directly hire folks?

raphar• 4 years ago

There are lot of HN members from Argentina & Brasil. There are plenty of offers from LA in "AskHN Who wants to be hired". That must be the easier way to find devs from our continent.

nickmancol• 4 years ago

Try https://torre.co they are specialized in hiring LA devs for American companies

sbayeta• 4 years ago

I'm working for a local company making ARS800,000 (almost USD 4,000) a month. I think I'm the most experienced senior, with a lot of business knowledge as I worked in the industry (Electronics Manufacturing) for almost 20 years. I not only code, but also make most of the architectural decisions.

After seeing this I realized how badly underpaid I am.

I work full stack, have pretty deep experience using postgresql and node js. So if thats something you find useful, don't hesitate to contact me. My email is my user name @Hotmail

ivnubinas• 4 years ago

Consider https://bluecoding.com, on their blog they have an article for each Latin American country that explains what to expect from Latam developers (english level, salary ranges, most used tech stack).

soneca6• 4 years ago

Search for unicorn startups in Brazil (there aren’t that much) and look for devs from those places on LinkedIn. The tech talent is usually good.

If you pay US salaries, by mentioning salary upfront you will have a lot of interest. If you pay even top 1% Brazilian salary, they will probably stay where they are.

jampa• 4 years ago

There are some sites for remote work that allows you to select countries and regions (like WeWorkRemotely), for Brazil some GitHubs that Brazilian look, like (https://github.com/DyegoCosta/trabalhando-remoto#empregos) that are in Portuguese, might have for other countries as well.

Most people that I know of are hired through companies that does long term staff augmentation or permanent contract work. I am one of those folks, I left my job at a Brazilian startup a month ago and now work as an Engineering Manager at https://rightbalance.io/.

Disclaimer: among other things, I am doing the hiring of senior people in LATAM for US companies, if you are in LATAM, and wants to apply, the interview will be with me and I always give feedback at the end of interview.

cuchoi• 4 years ago

https://www.getonbrd.com/

threefiftyone2• 4 years ago

There are a few agencies nowadays that are providing these services. You can also find people on LinkedIn (search for people who are working in fast growing tech companies or have graduated from top colleges)

Rekushi• 4 years ago

https://www.revelo.io/

Neither outsourcing nor a traditional recruiting agency. We're a talent platform that helps you source, vet, hire, and manage full-time dedicated engineers in Latin America.

We handle everything including payroll and compliance.

Disclaimer: I work for Revelo.

lxxpxlxxxx3• 4 years ago

South American here, I interviewed with a lot of local companies out of school. Mind you the highest offer I saw was $1000/month for mid level, also for some reason a lot of interviewers ghosted me (maybe I was not upto their standards of entry level or I failed the tests), so I was feeling like a failure after spending like 2 months job hunting, then it hit me that I could apply to US companies,

One week and one interview later I had a job (applied to like 5 companies max) making $3200/month as entry level.

To be honest I would have taken those local jobs but after such success with us companies I don't think I can afford it anymore.

Anyway If someone needs a frontend dev, just hmu, email on profile

seizethecheese• 4 years ago

Looks like you’re in Venezuela. How do you get paid by Americans?

jollofricepeas2• 4 years ago

Bitcoin

slrainka2• 4 years ago

You can pay them as independent contractors. They have to sign a W-8 BEN and you can make payments via Wise. If you see that you are hiring a relatively large team from the same country, then at some point you can open a local subsidiary (cost center) and employ them via the local entity. The way to do this has been the same - most US companies became open to this after 2020.

lxxpxlxxxx3• 4 years ago

Through paypal, im hired as a contractor, have to send invoices and stuff

throwmeaway666• 4 years ago

“An American company was offering him $15,000 per month to work for them,” Campos told Rest of World. “We cannot compete with that.”

Wow, that's crazy. As a (senior?) software engineer based in Chile who was recently hired by an American company for around $3.5k/mo (that was my offer) I am now feeling underpaid. :)

Assuming that this information is correct, I am now wondering how much I could get away with next time around...

soneca6• 4 years ago

You are underpaid.

There are two types of American companies hiring devs from LatAm. The ones that are actively recruiting in LatAm and the ones that just hire remote and don’t mind you are out of the US.

The actively recruiting ones are trying to make the salary arbitrage work in their favor. They will offer top 1% salary of the local market. Which is a lot lower than American labor market for tech. That’s probably what you got.

Then there are those that just hire remotely and don’t mind being outside of the US. They are basically the same as in the US. They don’t recruit in LatAm. They are also small companies. You don’t find them on LinkedIn or through recruiters. You find them on AngeList and HN’s Who is Hiring. Look for those and it will not be hard to find a job paying a senior $10k a month (more depending on experience, luck, and negotiation). Those $15k seems to be the ceiling though, FAANG don’t hire like this

nerdponx• 4 years ago

I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for inflated tech salaries in US metros. Those areas will seriously suffer if corporations decide they are no longer willing to pay through the nose to support the insane cost of living in NYC, SF, etc.

And white-collar Americans in tech will finally get to suffer along with the rest of the country as the American system of "spend more for a worse life". It shouldn't be so hard to keep a basic middle-class lifestyle, with historically low inflation, but it is.

TheBozzCL• 4 years ago

Latin American here. In my last year of college, I got a pretty decently-paid job at a local IT/tech company. Later that year I got hired by a FAANG, and my salary grew threefold. No wonder most of my college friends moved abroad as well.

In my country, the retail industry dreads Amazon's looming expansion. They've started hiring ex-Amazonians to try to catch up. I wonder if they've raised the salaries to match.

Chinjut• 4 years ago

Latin America dreads looming expansion of Amazon.

planetsprite• 4 years ago

What's the point of even hiring American tech talent anymore. For companies that still hire American engineers, are they really 3-4x better than engineers from countries where the average wage of software engineers is 3-4x less?

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

For companies that still hire American engineers, are they really 3-4x better than engineers from countries where the average wage of software engineers is 3-4x less?

They don't need to be; first, because wages aren't the whole cost of employment, and second because the measure being maximized is value minus cost, not value divided by cost.

diehunde• 4 years ago

Better the devil you know. Many companies like to hire people that worked at other big tech companies before instead of a small company that might be totally different.

camhenlin3• 4 years ago

I’ve hired about 50 Latin American devs as contractors over the last six months or so and they’ve all been absolutely top notch — I will continue to aggressively hire more.

Some anecdotal highlights:

- great time zone overlap with US business hours

- very very good English

- very strong engineers who actually take ownership of the products we’re working on

- leadership aspirations and drive - I’ve promoted a few folks to team lead positions

- shared culture that works in a similar way to US culture

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

Do they grind leetcode or are they so cheap you don’t care?

camhenlin3• 4 years ago

I hire through a contracting agency that prescreens for me. I do a short behavioral interview then hire. And I wouldn’t call them cheap, I pay many of them more than I’ve made in the US in the last 10 years

pulketo• 4 years ago

I knew this was the reason that everybody is asking for fluent English on every position

atleta3• 4 years ago

Eastern European here. This has been happening for a while. I haven't worked for a local (Hungarian) company for 8 years now. And even then it was just 6 months. In the past 14 years, since I've left my last 'real' job (except for that 6 months mentioned before) I either worked for US or Western European companies or my own startups.

So I've been thinking for a while that it's actually a pretty bad situation for local companies who want to develop either custom software (internal or a product) or the ones that have local clients and try to hire local talent. They are, in part, competing with US and Western European companies. And while 10 or even 5 years ago I didn't know to many people who did this, it has accelerated quite a bit.

I'm running a largish (~15k people) job board group on Facebook and I saw the pretty rapid raise in the salaries offered to people. Also, the increase that one can expect in the first 5 years is pretty steep, 200-300%. Meaning that the average senior level salary offers are about 2-3x as high as the entry level ones. (And senior apparently means 5 years in this context.) I'm not sure about the US situation (especially not the entry level salaries), but it seems that at least in part it's about the fact that as a senior you can find a remote job pretty easily.

felistoria• 4 years ago

As an American who is currently working on transitioning out of IT management into software development, this post and these comments have really made me feel like it’s not possible. This is quite the blow as I have been very much enjoying learning these new skills. Am I wasting my time?

mcntsh• 4 years ago

It's not just Latin America. Most of my acquaintances here in Western Europe are getting remote jobs at American companies.

Honestly, this should concern everyone who lives in the US. I remember the big push for remote work being the "new normal" and thinking how this would bite people who live in more expensive areas. Well... here you go.

U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent

Related Stories