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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

#171

Post by chrisseaton »

pc86 wrote: post #95
thaumaturgy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I can't do LeetCode to save my life. I'm not that kind of natural Google-tier genius.

But I have a relevant PhD, demonstrable industry experience leading a recognisable project, many papers, lots of experience developing juniors, influential keynotes, blog posts, etc.

If you used LeetCode you wouldn't hire me. I don't know if you think that's a loss or not? But it's a data point.

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

#173

Post by coredog64 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #80

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 Sl…

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

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

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

#176

Post by kragen »

giantg2 wrote: post #174
kragen wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, you're a youngster.

You're only as old as you feel. I feel like I'm ancient.

A friend of mine who died recently worked on Stretch at IBM. Later, he was one of the early employees of a hot cloud computing startup, in 01968.

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

#177

Post by ironmagma »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #157
ironmagma wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

So this is very, very different and incomparable situation than presented in the article or discussed in the comments. The same issues could present if you bought incompetent company in the US.

The language barrier was 80% of the problem. Everything else could have worked out if we had been on board and the management handled it correctly. The engineers were good enough.

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

#178

Post by devwastaken »

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 in part due to blue politics in universities pushing for more and more genericism in education, suiciding their skill output. The other part is the companies that should be involved in education and funding educational programs simply don't care to. This is the one single way to know if the "shortage" is real: is the company willing to invest in education? The answer has been no. Fewest scholarships, fewest interns, they don't fund programs, and they treat students as cash cows.

It makes sense when looking at the numbers. No use in putting money into U.S. education if they don't have to. The law allows them to import workers from elsewhere, parasiting off of their social educational programs and never having to pay a dime to them.

The solution is clear, we have to make it more economically viable to invest in the U.S, and that is by removing or severely limiting the mechanisms by which tech companies employ foreign workers. Or alternatively we start actually taxing these companies.

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

#179

Post by colechristensen »

Jensson wrote: post #102
colechristensen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible. Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have…

> and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it. Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in the world has found a better solution to this.

I guess the problem currently is that the incumbents aren't actually getting replaced. Doing a good job is just a means for a small number of people to make an enormous amount of money while everyone benefits from their quality for perhaps a handful of years before they're bought out to be eaten or destroyed by the existing big players.

There is a problem with competing with big players for more than a few years because they figure out ways to push you out of the market before you can beat them, with only a few exceptions.

That is the problem with the environment which needs to be solved.

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

#180

Post by MadSudaca »

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