13 ms·

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

214 points by braco_alva 5y ago

krasin 5y 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).
- novok 5y 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.
- jorblumesea 5y 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.
  - krasin 5y 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.
    - jorblumesea 5y ago
      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?country=USA&indicator=40334&countries=BRA,TTO,ARG,ECU&viz=line_chart&years=2013,2020 https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?country... Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and then...why not Europe?
      - laurencerowe 5y ago
        Having 3 hours of overlap during the regular work day is going to be much easier than no overlap during the normal work day and people having to work early/late for meetings.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Language/education/infrastructure are a lot easier to change that timezone, at least
- 88913527 5y 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.
99_00 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    Hiring from around the globe is tautologically increasing diversity.
- novok 5y 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 5y 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
tootie 5y 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 5y ago
Wheres a good place to find "DevOps"/SRE type people in the EST timezone in LatAm?
ironmagma 5y 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.
- xunn0026 5y ago
  You company basically did everything wrong. Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
  - ironmagma 5y 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.
    - xunn0026 5y ago
      Well, a remote hire is generally super easy to fire. A local employee can go to court and really mess things up!
      - wyclif 5y ago
        Maybe in Europe, but in the USA where the laws are "right to work", it's just as easy to fire an employee whether they are remote or on site.
        xunn0026 5y ago
        I know firing is easy in the US. But almost nobody from abroad will open a lawsuit against a company. While a local could be incentivised to do so or at least complain to various institutions or try small claims court. For eg. I've had a US customer not pay a pretty big invoice and it was too costly in terms of time and money to pursue. I had no recourse. So I just ate the loss.
_8j50 5y ago
Not just hiring, I've been asked to move there last year. It's the new "outsource to india"
throwmeaway666 5y 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...
- soneca 5y 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
planetsprite 5y 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?
- diehunde 5y 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.
- dragonwriter 5y 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.
atleta 5y 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.
gregdoesit 5y 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-to-navigate-a-heated-job-market/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-t... [2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-market https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hi...
- tinyhouse 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
vmception 5y 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)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pevey 5y 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.
- atlasunshrugged 5y 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.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Unless these people start building companies in said countries this does not benefit the countries. They re essentially tourists
  - bobthepanda 5y 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.
- dirtyid 5y 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.
- raziel2p 5y ago
pibefision 5y ago
No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some information about the topic.
nestorD 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- golemiprague 5y ago
- e4e78a06 5y 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/ https://www.canvas.com/
  - nestorD 5y ago
    Yes, that's the "in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists" part.
    - e4e78a06 5y ago
brandonmenc 5y 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.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Intel used to build their best chips in Costa Rica. Sorry for the useless trivia.
- pevezzac 5y ago
  FWIW, Microsoft is hiring in Costa Rica. More specifically the M365 Core team. I work with a few of Costa Ricans.
  - plumeria 5y 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.
novok 5y 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 5y 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.
  - novok 5y 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.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      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.
bkovacev 5y 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.
- Tehchops 5y ago
  I know the experience varies, but I've seen nothing but trouble from hiring devs from EE.
  - bkovacev 5y 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.
  - tartoran 5y 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.
- ng12 5y 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.
  - 5y ago
1270018080 5y 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.
- jjeaff 5y 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.
- Hermitian909 5y 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-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
  - 1270018080 5y 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.
hammock 5y ago
How can I help my company recruit better in Latin America? Is an outside agency the only way?
- threefiftyone 5y ago
  You can try and directly approach people from LATAM. Find workers from great local tech companies and send them messages through LinkedIn
Rekushi 5y ago
[dead]
- elforce002 5y ago
  Interesting. There's a trend now regarding this type of service.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  Do you pay out in crypto?
  - Rekushi 5y ago
    Not at this time, but our jobs do pay out in USD.
- sbayeta 5y ago
  I get a lot of offers from your company in my LinkedIn in feed. I never applied because all of then show a USD9,000 salary, no matter what the technical specialty is, which I find a little suspicious (I assume you're just luring candidates to provide their data, with no concrete position paying that number). Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not accusing you of this behavior, just commenting that this is what I imagine and the reason I have not applied. Could you please tell me more about how your company works? Thanks!
  - Rekushi 5y ago
    Thanks for the feedback - I will relay this to the candidate marketing team! That said, roles with a USD 9,000 salary (or above) are available right now depending on your seniority and expertise. The process works like this for candidates: 1. You apply to the Revelo Network. 2. If you meet the minimum standard (years of experience, good English skills, skills in popular frameworks and languages) you will be granted access to the platform. 3. In the platform you will see available jobs - the salary and company are 100% transparent to you for each job. 4. If you end up accepting a job, Revelo will handle payroll (all our jobs pay out in USD), benefits, and more. All jobs are full-time dedicated remote positions embedded in engineering teams like any other full-time developer. No project-based or freelance work. I hope this helps.
Zaskoda 5y 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.
jviotti 5y 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.
- soneca 5y 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 5y 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
    - kragen 5y ago
      Most American engineers (even specifically programmers) fail FizzBuzz-style coding tests, too, if you go by job interview candidates. That's why FizzBuzz exists.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - 5y ago
obblekk 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
yftsui 5y ago
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727 Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.
hn_throwaway_99 5y 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 5y 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.
  - SwiftyBug 5y 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
soneca 5y 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.
- SwiftyBug 5y 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.
  - wyclif 5y 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.
    - epx 5y ago
      Fact is, there are occupations that pay a nice salary in Brazil, even after conversion to US$, even with the current exchange. Brazil is not poor; lots of flashy cars on the streets, upscale bars and restaurants are shock full day after day. But there is this deeply rooted notion that software engineers are not supposed to make as much a judge, a doctor or a higher-rank bureaucrat of the public sector. The current bewildering is more cultural than anything else.
      - 5y ago
kache_ 5y 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.
- vivab0rg 5y 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 https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78
  - kache_ 5y ago
    Eugenio is super cool, got to meet him in person. Check out his blog https://eugeniopace.org/ https://eugeniopace.org/
ryanSrich 5y 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.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  But why do all these companies have to be in america? One often hears about companies hiring remotely, but hardly ever establishing remotely.
  - atleta 5y 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.
  - ryanSrich 5y 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - achow 5y ago
    To be close to customers?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kragen 5y 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.
- brezelgoring 5y 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
  - 5y ago
myth2018 5y 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.
bumblebritches5 5y ago
i_like_waiting 5y 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 5y ago
  Please describe numbers. Your "2x base offer" can still probably be very small. Example: is 2x +140K ?
  - i_like_waiting 5y ago
    yeah, its from £35k to £70k, nothing that breathtaking, but significant for me
tbrock 5y 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 5y 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.
- ivnubinas 5y ago
  Consider https://bluecoding.com 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).
- threefiftyone 5y 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)
- nickmancol 5y ago
  Try https://torre.co https://torre.co they are specialized in hiring LA devs for American companies
- sbayeta 5y 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
- soneca 5y ago
lxxpxlxxxx 5y 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 5y ago
  Looks like you’re in Venezuela. How do you get paid by Americans?
  - slrainka 5y 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.
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      The question was about Venezuela because of the sanctions. It’s not just any country that works with Wise Venezuela is banned on wise and many/most banking apps. https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i-use-wise-in https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...
      - slrainka 5y ago
        Ah yes, sorry, didn't catch that.
  - 5y ago
nerdponx 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Latin America dreads looming expansion of Amazon.
camhenlin 5y 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 5y ago
  Do they grind leetcode or are they so cheap you don’t care?
  - camhenlin 5y 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
    - tartoran 5y ago
      So you’re basically paying them US salaries?
      - camhenlin 5y ago
        I’d say probably low non-FAANG US salaries from pre-pandemic times is pretty accurate from what I’ve seen at the moment, depending on experience
pulketo 5y ago
I knew this was the reason that everybody is asking for fluent English on every position
felistoria 5y 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 5y 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.

214 points by braco_alva 5y 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).

novok 5y 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.
jorblumesea 5y 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.
- krasin 5y 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.
  - jorblumesea 5y ago
    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?country=USA&indicator=40334&countries=BRA,TTO,ARG,ECU&viz=line_chart&years=2013,2020 https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?country... Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and then...why not Europe?
    - laurencerowe 5y ago
      Having 3 hours of overlap during the regular work day is going to be much easier than no overlap during the normal work day and people having to work early/late for meetings.
- 8note 5y ago
  Language/education/infrastructure are a lot easier to change that timezone, at least
88913527 5y 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.

99_00 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  Hiring from around the globe is tautologically increasing diversity.
novok 5y 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 5y 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

tootie 5y 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 5y ago

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

ironmagma 5y 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.

xunn0026 5y ago
You company basically did everything wrong. Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
- ironmagma 5y 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.
  - xunn0026 5y ago
    Well, a remote hire is generally super easy to fire. A local employee can go to court and really mess things up!
    - wyclif 5y ago
      Maybe in Europe, but in the USA where the laws are "right to work", it's just as easy to fire an employee whether they are remote or on site.
      - xunn0026 5y ago
        I know firing is easy in the US. But almost nobody from abroad will open a lawsuit against a company. While a local could be incentivised to do so or at least complain to various institutions or try small claims court. For eg. I've had a US customer not pay a pretty big invoice and it was too costly in terms of time and money to pursue. I had no recourse. So I just ate the loss.

_8j50 5y ago

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

throwmeaway666 5y 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...

soneca 5y 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

planetsprite 5y 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?

diehunde 5y 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.
dragonwriter 5y 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.

atleta 5y 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.

gregdoesit 5y 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-to-navigate-a-heated-job-market/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-t... [2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-market https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hi...

tinyhouse 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

vmception 5y 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)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pevey 5y 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.

atlasunshrugged 5y 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.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Unless these people start building companies in said countries this does not benefit the countries. They re essentially tourists
- bobthepanda 5y 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.
dirtyid 5y 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.
raziel2p 5y ago

pibefision 5y ago

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

nestorD 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
golemiprague 5y ago
e4e78a06 5y 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/ https://www.canvas.com/
- nestorD 5y ago
  Yes, that's the "in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists" part.
  - e4e78a06 5y ago

brandonmenc 5y 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.

beebeepka 5y ago
Intel used to build their best chips in Costa Rica. Sorry for the useless trivia.
pevezzac 5y ago
FWIW, Microsoft is hiring in Costa Rica. More specifically the M365 Core team. I work with a few of Costa Ricans.
- plumeria 5y 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.

novok 5y 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 5y 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.
- novok 5y 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.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    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.

bkovacev 5y 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.

Tehchops 5y ago
I know the experience varies, but I've seen nothing but trouble from hiring devs from EE.
- bkovacev 5y 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.
- tartoran 5y 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.
ng12 5y 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.
- 5y ago

1270018080 5y 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.

jjeaff 5y 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.
Hermitian909 5y 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-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
- 1270018080 5y 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.

hammock 5y ago

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

threefiftyone 5y ago
You can try and directly approach people from LATAM. Find workers from great local tech companies and send them messages through LinkedIn

Rekushi 5y ago

[dead]

elforce002 5y ago
Interesting. There's a trend now regarding this type of service.
danlugo92 5y ago
Do you pay out in crypto?
- Rekushi 5y ago
  Not at this time, but our jobs do pay out in USD.
sbayeta 5y ago
I get a lot of offers from your company in my LinkedIn in feed. I never applied because all of then show a USD9,000 salary, no matter what the technical specialty is, which I find a little suspicious (I assume you're just luring candidates to provide their data, with no concrete position paying that number). Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not accusing you of this behavior, just commenting that this is what I imagine and the reason I have not applied. Could you please tell me more about how your company works? Thanks!
- Rekushi 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback - I will relay this to the candidate marketing team! That said, roles with a USD 9,000 salary (or above) are available right now depending on your seniority and expertise. The process works like this for candidates: 1. You apply to the Revelo Network. 2. If you meet the minimum standard (years of experience, good English skills, skills in popular frameworks and languages) you will be granted access to the platform. 3. In the platform you will see available jobs - the salary and company are 100% transparent to you for each job. 4. If you end up accepting a job, Revelo will handle payroll (all our jobs pay out in USD), benefits, and more. All jobs are full-time dedicated remote positions embedded in engineering teams like any other full-time developer. No project-based or freelance work. I hope this helps.

Zaskoda 5y 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.

jviotti 5y 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.

soneca 5y 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 5y 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
  - kragen 5y ago
    Most American engineers (even specifically programmers) fail FizzBuzz-style coding tests, too, if you go by job interview candidates. That's why FizzBuzz exists.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - 5y ago

obblekk 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

yftsui 5y ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727 Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.

hn_throwaway_99 5y 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 5y 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.
- SwiftyBug 5y 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

soneca 5y 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.

SwiftyBug 5y 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.
- wyclif 5y 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.
  - epx 5y ago
    Fact is, there are occupations that pay a nice salary in Brazil, even after conversion to US$, even with the current exchange. Brazil is not poor; lots of flashy cars on the streets, upscale bars and restaurants are shock full day after day. But there is this deeply rooted notion that software engineers are not supposed to make as much a judge, a doctor or a higher-rank bureaucrat of the public sector. The current bewildering is more cultural than anything else.
    - 5y ago

kache_ 5y 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.

vivab0rg 5y 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 https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78
- kache_ 5y ago
  Eugenio is super cool, got to meet him in person. Check out his blog https://eugeniopace.org/ https://eugeniopace.org/

ryanSrich 5y 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.

cblconfederate 5y ago
But why do all these companies have to be in america? One often hears about companies hiring remotely, but hardly ever establishing remotely.
- atleta 5y 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.
- ryanSrich 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- achow 5y ago
  To be close to customers?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kragen 5y 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.

brezelgoring 5y 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
- 5y ago

myth2018 5y 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.

bumblebritches5 5y ago

i_like_waiting 5y 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 5y ago
Please describe numbers. Your "2x base offer" can still probably be very small. Example: is 2x +140K ?
- i_like_waiting 5y ago
  yeah, its from £35k to £70k, nothing that breathtaking, but significant for me

tbrock 5y 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 5y 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.
ivnubinas 5y ago
Consider https://bluecoding.com 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).
threefiftyone 5y 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)
nickmancol 5y ago
Try https://torre.co https://torre.co they are specialized in hiring LA devs for American companies
sbayeta 5y 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
soneca 5y ago

lxxpxlxxxx 5y 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 5y ago
Looks like you’re in Venezuela. How do you get paid by Americans?
- slrainka 5y 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.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    The question was about Venezuela because of the sanctions. It’s not just any country that works with Wise Venezuela is banned on wise and many/most banking apps. https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i-use-wise-in https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...
    - slrainka 5y ago
      Ah yes, sorry, didn't catch that.
- 5y ago

nerdponx 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Latin America dreads looming expansion of Amazon.

camhenlin 5y 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 5y ago
Do they grind leetcode or are they so cheap you don’t care?
- camhenlin 5y 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
  - tartoran 5y ago
    So you’re basically paying them US salaries?
    - camhenlin 5y ago
      I’d say probably low non-FAANG US salaries from pre-pandemic times is pretty accurate from what I’ve seen at the moment, depending on experience

pulketo 5y ago

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

felistoria 5y 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 5y 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.