U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by RealityVoid » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

faangiq wrote: post #120

gregdoesit wrote: post #3

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 mo…

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

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

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

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

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

#142

Post by RealityVoid » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #121

csomar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shouldn't mediocre be generally acceptable? It seems unreal to expect the majority to be above average.

My experience is mediocre is insufficient in SW preojects. You NEED some good technical pillars, else it will all be shit.

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

#143

Post by downut » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

ozfive wrote: post #99

downut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ch…

Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the company armored themselves against this sort of competency attack against The Machine by having in-house IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse engineered. This does have the additional side effect of making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to implement in-house statistical process control. Which, again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be diplomatic here... discover which processes could be improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of process.

However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".

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

#144

Post by brezelgoring » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #109

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…

>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

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

#145

Post by mwcampbell » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #101

obblekk wrote: post #56

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 p…

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 on…

> 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.

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

#146

Post by Latour » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:30 PM UTC

WanderPanda wrote: post #14

nestorD wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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.

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

#147

Post by no_wizard » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #96

csomar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

That is not what I mean. I am talking about well…when they are generic applications that don’t require bespoke work to be done. Maybe HN is the wrong crowd for this as I think most of us work in more specialized capacity. There is a lot of software out there however being written that is say, wiring power BI applications with predefined requirements, or collecting information via surveys that need to be tied to a CMS. Stuff I’ve seen work pretty well when contracted assuming the person overseeing the venture was competent of course.

I’d say anything core to a business in terms of how it functions is not ripe for outsourcing, and anyone doing this is going to feel a lot of pain

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

#148

Post by ddorian43 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

i_like_waiting wrote: post #128

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…

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

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

#149

Post by pid-1 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

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…

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

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

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

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

#150

Post by chrisseaton » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #106

chrisseaton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced But employers are paying more and more than ever before?

Paying more money doesn't mean you're investing into entry level employees necessarily.

The goalposts are all over the place in this thread.

These people must be working for terrible companies. Come and work for Shopify! We even partner with a university to offer year-round internships while you study for your degree. I regularly mentor juniors to build them up to research-level engineers.