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

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

#91

Post by iamstupidsimple »

Accujack wrote: post #78
tinyhouse wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 tha…

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.

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

#92

Post by 1270018080 »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #53
1270018080 wrote: post #22

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…

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 t…

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.

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

#93

Post by ryanSrich »

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.

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

#94

Post by dirtyid »

pevey wrote: post #5

"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…

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.

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

#95

Post by pc86 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #61
devwastaken wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 univers…

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.

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

#96

Post by reaperducer »

csomar wrote: post #84
no_wizard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

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…

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.

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

#98

Post by Hermitian909 »

1270018080 wrote: post #92
Hermitian909 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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.

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

#99

Post by ozfive »

downut wrote: post #70
colechristensen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

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 trivia…

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.

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

#100

Post by Daishiman »

ironmagma wrote: post #64
vanusa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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").

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.

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