[HN Gopher] U.S. companies are hiring Latin America's tech talent
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U.S. companies are hiring Latin America's tech talent
Author : braco_alva
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-01-30 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| i_like_waiting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Please describe numbers. Your "2x base offer" can still
| probably be very small. Example: is 2x +140K ?
| krasin wrote:
| 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).
| jorblumesea wrote:
| 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.
| krasin wrote:
| 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.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| Overall, Latin America has way less STEM graduates per
| capita than they need and is absolutely unable to fill the
| demand. Some countries might fare better than others but
| the trend is overall that most companies will end up
| competing for the few graduates that do exist. The article
| also pointed this out.
|
| https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?countr
| y...
|
| Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and
| then...why not Europe?
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| gregdoesit wrote:
| 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...
| devwastaken wrote:
| 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.
| holoduke wrote:
| 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.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| 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.
| raz32dust wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Maybe your company is the exception.
|
| The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to
| a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the
| industry.
| colmvp wrote:
| That's news to me.
|
| In December, I applied to a number of blue chip companies
| for frontend positions and only got callbacks to three of
| them despite a lot of work experience writing JS for real
| applications including a YC company. Some YC companies also
| said to me they wanted someone more experienced in
| Vue/React instead of potentially allowing me time and space
| to ramp up my knowledge of it. So clearly there were other
| applicants who had both a lot of work experience AND the
| precise tech knowledge they needed, so they didn't have to
| take a risk on someone who didn't perfectly fit the
| position.
|
| I eventually landed a dream position, but a huge reason why
| they looked at my application in the first place was
| because I knew of a long time employee. Obviously I had to
| pass the technical and behavior interviews, but they had a
| deluge of applicants and my application would've been lost
| to the ether had it not been for that connection.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _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?
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
| dcposch wrote:
| I've interviewed a lot of software engineer candidates.
| It's always surprising how often people with impressive
| resumes, including computer science degrees from good-to-
| great universities, can't code at all.
|
| I'm not talking about trick "do you remember A* search"
| questions. I'm talking about the ability to write a basic
| program and to reason about what it will do.
|
| I've seen this across the gamut, from new grads to staff
| engineers.
|
| Part of this is selection bias: those folks probably apply
| to many companies before they slip through somewhere, so
| they're overrepresented as interviewees.
|
| My sense is that it's becoming more common. Undergrad CS
| has ever more people who are in it for reasons unrelated to
| enjoyment or curiosity.
| newsclues wrote:
| Currently in a Canadian college for cybersecurity and the
| content of the courses are being nerfed and the quality of
| the graduates are churning out are largely dogshit.
| syshum wrote:
| Universities today seem to be focusing on quantity of
| education not quality
|
| There goal is to get as much student loan money that they
| can, they do not seem to care about the quality of
| education the students are getting
|
| This goes for all levels of universities, and all degree
| programs.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Universities were never job training programs, their
| product has always been the right to engage in class
| signaling. By paying the university a pile of money you
| signified to potential employers (and everyone else) that
| you were a member of at least the upper middle class,
| with the financial resources (and sometimes family
| connections) to support making those payments of time and
| money. Not having that signifier was a signal that you
| lacked the time and money to dump into that effort, given
| that you had to spend so much of it surviving.
|
| It's the same human impulse that drives people to bind
| their feet, value bleached skin, engage in conspicuous
| consumption, etc. It's all an elaborate signal game
| designed to convince people of your social status.
|
| The problem is that we looked at that system and instead
| of trying to build something better we dumped more money
| into it in the form of student loans and expected that
| now more people will be given access to those class
| signifiers and thereby raise their social status and
| standard of living. In actual practice, of course, what
| we did was raise the bar on what qualifies as a class
| signifier, forcing a generation into wage slavery with
| little real benefit to them or to society as a whole
| (other than those institutions who siphon off those extra
| dollars and use them to metastasize extra layers of
| administration and management to little effect)
|
| What we need is for education to be more job skills
| training and less social positioning. Funding for adult
| education should be linked to the success rate of
| students leaving those programs. If you have the money to
| burn studying topics that will indicate to your peers how
| little you need the money, then great. That's apparently
| the way we've decided to structure things. For the rest
| of us though let's try to encourage study of topics that
| will help society work better instead of vainly trying to
| convince the rich kids club to let us in.
| syshum wrote:
| I agree with all of that....
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that
| can code."
|
| And companies stereotype all graduates as worth nothing to
| them.
|
| I had a couple simple Android apps when I graduated. Even
| though they were simple, it would show that I could follow
| best practices, code, test, and deliver something. I had a
| decent GPA (3.5), clubs, etc. I still had a hard time
| finding companies that would even give me an interview.
|
| So sure, a degree doesn't mean too much (my masters has
| done nothing for me). But it seems companies have simply
| given up and are exacerbating the very problem they are
| creating.
| kragen wrote:
| How are you on leetcode?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I believe LC wasn't a thing back then, or at least not
| mainstream.
|
| I don't waste my time on LC now. If I get free time, I'd
| rather work on a personal project or hobby.
|
| Granted, I'm actually thinking of moving into some sort
| of corporate strategy analyst role since I don't really
| get to code anymore. The past 2 years has been very
| little coding or business problem solving. It's mostly
| been config, infrastructure, prod support, and
| meetings/paperwork. I'm tired of it. I want to solve
| problems and build substantial things. I assume I'm rusty
| when it comes to coding now.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is the sweet spot that products like LeetCode or
| BinarySearch _could_ be used to solve - people who have the
| academic background, and should know how to code if they
| 're coming out of a good program, but don't have a
| portfolio of work to show or a catalogue of experience to
| draw examples and answers from for a typical interview. And
| all the DSA stuff that is irrelevant for 90% of dev jobs
| 90% of the time is still fresh in their mind.
|
| Ask them 2-3 LC easies/mediums in the language of their
| choice for them to prove they can actually write code, and
| that's really all you need. Unfortunately it somehow became
| "let's have a 5 hour long two-part panel interview where we
| ask you half a dozen LC hards and oh yeah don't google
| anything" as a way to hire experienced people who have a
| decade of work they can talk about the discuss ad nauseum.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not going to lie, as soon as you mentioned LC I was
| disinterested. But your suggestion sounds good. A few
| easy/medium questions and maybe the ability to Google
| sounds fair. I sort of enjoy basic fizz bang code
| screenings.
| pc86 wrote:
| And just to be clear I'm only suggesting it for junior
| positions. Most of the time I think you can suss out
| whether someone can code by discussing their direct
| contributions to previous projects. If not, you can
| always do one LC problem.
|
| I see it as a great way to just run a sanity check that
| this person who graduated from Random State six months
| ago can actually code, and as a great way to ensure high
| quality very senior people refuse to go through your
| interview (unless you're paying FAANG wages).
| EVdotIO wrote:
| I have about a decade of real professional coding
| experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the
| caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can
| write code. I can count on one finger the number of
| interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch.
| There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the
| news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah
| and the deafening silence of _any_ interest.
|
| This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise
| of a lack of qualified candidates.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| 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).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 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.
| Accujack wrote:
| I haven't seen any company do that in a very long time.
| What industry are you working in?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I work in e-commerce at Shopify. My company is building
| some great developer experience stuff for the long-term
| like some truly excellent cloud-development environments.
|
| My previous company, Oracle, was developing an entirely
| new kind of language virtual-machine to run the
| programming languages of the future as well.
|
| I see this in many places.
| Accujack wrote:
| That's just long term product planning. The rest of the
| people here are talking about long term employee
| development - making your employees more valuable so they
| produce better products rather than treating them as
| costs that must be reduced.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced
|
| But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Paying more money doesn't mean you're investing into
| entry level employees necessarily.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The goalposts are all over the place in this thread.
|
| These people must be working for terrible companies. Come
| and work for Shopify! We even partner with a university
| to offer year-round internships while you study for your
| degree. I regularly mentor juniors to build them up to
| research-level engineers.
| irrational wrote:
| If I wanted to get a tech masters degree, my company
| would pay for it. If I want to learn a new technology, my
| manager will absolutely allow me to spend time doing
| that. I'm constantly working on projects that force me to
| learn new technologies. I feel like my company had no
| problems with my becoming more valuable. It's mostly up
| to me.
| scsilver wrote:
| The talent abroad ends up working for US companies though,
| how will dominance dissipate. The market and financing is in
| the US.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Shouldn't mediocre be generally acceptable? It seems unreal
| to expect the majority to be above average.
| csomar wrote:
| Problem is, if you are outsourcing remotely, you want
| someone who is quite competent for him to be able to work
| on his own and pick up on the lack of face to face
| meetings. Mediocre as a result will give less than
| mediocre results or no results.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or there's a need for communication. It doesn't matter if
| the person is "quite competent" if they're on their own
| building something that doesn't fit the requirements. An
| average dev shouldn't have any issue being able to Google
| the occasional problem. The vast majority of the issue we
| have with outsourced work is subpar English
| communication.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| My experience is mediocre is insufficient in SW
| preojects. You NEED some good technical pillars, else it
| will all be shit.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| 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.
| Accujack wrote:
| >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.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| I mean, if you were CEO, would you choose to reduce profit
| when you have investors on your back or want to grow staff
| quickly? Outside of VC driven cash cows or big tech,
| there's not that much money to go around at the bottom.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| downut wrote:
| This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing
| industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers.
| The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs
| at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is
| simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment
| manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to
| have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes
| that would be nearly trivial for an in-house on-site
| engineer to make. It's not unique to her particular
| company; this is the way her industrial customers and
| suppliers work too. The backend software is managed the
| same way. Buy Oracle/MS/Google whatever integrated
| functionality, and hire consultants to make changes. No
| expertise in-house.
|
| No in-house expertise means no management responsibility
| for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same
| vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive
| replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly
| competent engineers, like my wife.
|
| Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue?
| This is the present and inevitable future.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This is how startups succeed and take market share very
| quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent
| people build something which is significantly cheaper and
| better than the incumbent because they aren't weighed
| down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing
| things poorly in the most expensive way possible.
|
| Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who
| has existed so long they just have piles of money or the
| startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster.
|
| It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game
| created by the economic and legal environment which tends
| towards a large proportion of useless work and barely
| adequate quality. I.e this is why we can't have nice
| things and it's not exactly clear how to fix it.
| Jensson wrote:
| > and it's not exactly clear how to fix it.
|
| Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old
| corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution
| is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in
| the world has found a better solution to this.
| ozfive wrote:
| The ERP that my company uses is proprietary and they
| charge large sums of money to make custom changes. I am
| an in house developer that has gotten to know the
| database backing the ERP and have extrapolated
| functionality based on stored procedures and table
| schemas. The work I do would cost my company much more
| than my salary and I build interfaces that connect to
| marketplaces or marketplace API aggregators such as
| ChannelAdvisor. I can attest to your statement that in
| house engineers can cost much less than the modification
| engineers who know the system but will charge an arm and
| a leg.
|
| As a matter of fact I've carved out a niche in these
| matters over the years. Essentially reverse engineering
| systems and building out functionality instead of the
| original creators of the software.
|
| EDIT: The ERP company never made it not possible to
| interface through their DB in their contracts or by
| encrypting their functionality in the DB.
|
| The amount of value I bring to my company is greater than
| 100 fold of my salary.
| kragen wrote:
| Hmm, so 99% of the value you create is being skimmed off
| by the company's shareholders and management? Have you
| thought about trying to renegotiate to a more equitable
| split, like 10%/90% or 50%/50% instead of 1%/99%? Or is
| that impossible because you're in a very weak bargaining
| position?
|
| That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs
| like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other
| outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they
| are in a better bargaining position and so they can
| capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create
| instead of less than 1%.
| downut wrote:
| Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the
| company armored themselves against this sort of
| competency attack against The Machine by having in-house
| IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which
| are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse
| engineered. This does have the additional side effect of
| making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to
| implement in-house statistical process control. Which,
| again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be
| diplomatic here... discover which processes could be
| improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate
| consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort
| indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of
| process.
|
| However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems
| it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch
| of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a
| massive SPOF".
| syshum wrote:
| >>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....
| Clubber wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| If you outsourced to French engineers you would have to
| accommodate all of their rights and work styles which don't
| exist so much in "developing economies". A French engineer
| probably would not be online at 6am and 11pm on the same
| day to attend meetings and solve problems for their
| American managers. Eastern European, African, or SE Asian
| engineers would though.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I've hired French engineers in France and they've done
| great work. Hard workers too.
|
| But the impression France has is probably a turn off for
| many. There are other problems too like it taking 3 months
| for a new French hire to start. Getting rid of them is
| extremely difficult as well. There are lots of additional
| taxes you have to pay the French government too. There's
| just so much risk in hiring there that you're better off
| going elsewhere with more modern employment law for
| skilled, high demand workers. Don't remind me of the
| monthly paperwork we have to send the government to assure
| them the French employee isn't working too much and is
| taking vacation. An absolute joke.
|
| The French government doesn't make French engineers very
| attractive unfortunately.
| marvin wrote:
| Haha, modern employment law :D You'd cause hilarity if
| you used that expression anywhere in the Scandinavian
| public discourse, or at least the Norwegian. You'd get
| tomatoes thrown at you and no one would listen to a
| single word.
|
| Not that I necessarily disagree with you or miss your
| point, but this is a very strong ideological divide. It's
| not about modern vs. archaic unless you posit that
| employment law that protects employees is such a
| detriment to an economy's effectiveness that it's
| effectively obsolete.
|
| Maybe at some point it will be a question of what
| economies actually manage to get things done and thrive
| and those who don't, but that's the kind of long-term,
| almost geopolitical shift that happens over decades at
| the least.
|
| E.g. no one who wants a position of power would advocate
| for a pure planned economy today, rather than a market
| economy. I sort of doubt that employee protections are
| such a millstone around the neck that they will go the
| same way, but who knows.
|
| It's an interesting question as you see a tendency of
| economies with less protections and higher salary luring
| away lots of really high performers.
| nemo44x wrote:
| What I mean by that is how worker protection laws from
| the Industrial Age and which apply to hourly wage
| employees are applied to professional workers that have
| autonomy and other attributes that make them very
| different from hourly workers.
|
| The USA has a concept of an "exempt" and "nonexempt"
| worker and a series of questions that determine this
| status. In general, hourly workers (nonexempt) get many
| protections encoded into law that professionals don't.
| And professionals don't want them except for a very small
| minority of oddballs that want to unionize.
|
| So in essence, applying the same set of outdated rules to
| everyone. It even makes it hard to compete with
| colleagues for promotions if your hours are limited. Of
| course the French engineers I had lied to the government
| about hours worked as they wanted to maximize bonuses,
| stock grants, and promotions.
| BigRedDog1669 wrote:
| The legal protections on hourly workers aren't enforced
| in the US or are skirted around by making hourly
| employees contractors. Professionals would like some of
| the protections but only if they are actually enforced.
| faangiq wrote:
| Reminder, every "talent shortage" is actually a wage shortage.
| Double those salaries and you'll find plenty of talent.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| 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.
| faangiq wrote:
| Believe me you start paying those guys 800k a year they'll
| wait a few more years before retiring.
| mooreds wrote:
| 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.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| 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.
| scsilver wrote:
| 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.
| Accujack wrote:
| >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_wizard wrote:
| 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
| csomar wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| A company I worked for struggled for years trying to find
| the right CRUD system.
|
| Off-the-shelf packages didn't work right because they
| couldn't be tailored to the existing workflow, and couldn't
| be integrated into other systems. Three attempts at
| offshoring all failed because of culture and communication
| differences.
|
| In the end, it was done in-house. It took longer, but the
| application is exactly what was required, and new features
| can be added in days or weeks, not months or quarters. Last
| I heard, almost everyone was happy with the home-grown
| solution.
|
| CRUD can be simple. But CRUD can also be hard. Anyone who
| thinks that they can spin up a generic CRUD and solve any
| problem is someone who doesn't really understand what the
| problem is.
| no_wizard wrote:
| That is not what I mean. I am talking about well...when
| they are generic applications that don't require bespoke
| work to be done. Maybe HN is the wrong crowd for this as
| I think most of us work in more specialized capacity.
| There is a lot of software out there however being
| written that is say, wiring power BI applications with
| predefined requirements, or collecting information via
| surveys that need to be tied to a CMS. Stuff I've seen
| work pretty well when contracted assuming the person
| overseeing the venture was competent of course.
|
| I'd say anything core to a business in terms of how it
| functions is not ripe for outsourcing, and anyone doing
| this is going to feel a lot of pain
| bkovacev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bkovacev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bkovacev wrote:
| 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
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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.
| bkovacev wrote:
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| 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-...
| spamizbad wrote:
| Noted. Thank you!
| Tehchops wrote:
| I know the experience varies, but I've seen nothing but trouble
| from hiring devs from EE.
| bkovacev wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not just hiring, I've been asked to move there last year. It's
| the new "outsource to india"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| 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)
| [deleted]
| soneca wrote:
| > _" 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.
| pevey wrote:
| "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.
| raziel2p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| pid-1 wrote:
| 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| 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.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| 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...
| 1270018080 wrote:
| 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.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Top SF pay is increasing _faster_ than 5 years ago, not
| slower. The same appears to be true in NL. My
| interpretation is that NL group 3 salaries are going
| towards SF but are kept lower by the lack of a local middle
| market and the various difficulties pulling in devs from a
| smaller country in a different time zone from most big
| players.
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| Yeah, as the other reply said, that 400k L5a (Senior I)
| Uber job in SF is now paying 580k first year & ~520k/year
| annualized over 4 years (increased stock grants, large
| sign-on bonuses, front-loaded vesting). Amazon increased
| the top of their mid-level payband by ~100k and the top of
| their senior payband by ~200k. 500k/year is the new
| "target" senior comp at FAANG & co (where previously
| 350-400k was what you were looking for). The international
| numbers are playing catch-up but it's not really slowing
| things down very much in the US.
| [deleted]
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Sell that million dollar Bay Are house and move somewhere
| better but less expensive. Don't worry.
| syshum wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| jviotti wrote:
| 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.
| soneca wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kragen wrote:
| Most American engineers (even specifically programmers)
| fail FizzBuzz-style coding tests, too, if you go by job
| interview candidates. That's why FizzBuzz exists.
| Daishiman wrote:
| 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.
| kache_ wrote:
| 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.
| obblekk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >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.
| hammock wrote:
| How can I help my company recruit better in Latin America? Is an
| outside agency the only way?
| pibefision wrote:
| No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some
| information about the topic.
| Rekushi wrote:
| My company[1] runs a talent platform that helps US companies
| source, hire, and manage Latin American tech talent.
|
| Happy to answer any questions.
|
| [1] https://www.revelo.io/
| elforce002 wrote:
| Interesting. There's a trend now regarding this type of
| service.
| kragen wrote:
| 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".
|
| 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. 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. 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 Lopez 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.
| lvass wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| What country, if you don't mind asking? Do a lot of other
| people there also get paid in cryptocurrency?
| vivab0rg wrote:
| I'm a half-retired Argentinian developer still living in
| Argentina. I second the parent comment 100%
| brezelgoring wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| 99_00 wrote:
| 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.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| > 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
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hiring from around the globe is tautologically increasing
| diversity.
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| ironmagma wrote:
| 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.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| You company basically did everything wrong.
|
| Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work
| with for everybody involved.
| vanusa wrote:
| 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.
| ironmagma wrote:
| 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").
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I can hardly imagine that situation working out if the
| company you acquired were in the US.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Newsflash: competent senior engineers in LatAm with 10+
| years of experience are not dramatically cheaper than US
| engineers outside of NY/SF.
|
| A good engineer in Latam might work below market rate for a
| couple of years, then they realize their market value and
| stop working at a discount.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| So this is very, very different and incomparable situation
| than presented in the article or discussed in the comments.
| The same issues could present if you bought incompetent
| company in the US.
| myth2018 wrote:
| 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.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| 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.
| nestorD wrote:
| 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...).
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| 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/
| golemiprague wrote:
| WanderPanda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FWIW, Microsoft is hiring in Costa Rica. More specifically the
| M365 Core team. I work with a few of Costa Ricans.
| plumeria wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Intel used to build their best chips in Costa Rica. Sorry for
| the useless trivia.
| [deleted]
| novok wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The worst is countries that do not share a Monday-Friday
| working week. MENA tends to be Sunday-Thurs, so in
| combination with the time zone it means you can only really
| do Mon-Wed meetings US time.
| yftsui wrote:
| Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727
|
| Interesting decision on remove "pillaging" from title.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| VectorLock wrote:
| Wheres a good place to find "DevOps"/SRE type people in the EST
| timezone in LatAm?
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