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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

#281
post #232
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's…

Why European influences, vs the experiences of people that the Europeans screwed over to become wealthy? This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft.

In my comment, I said, "Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers." This was the beginning of my second paragraph's topic sentence. You responded, "This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft." Perhaps you intended to post your comment in response to a different comment? Or possibly you don't know what "plunder" means?

In any case, I think "the experiences of people that the Europeans screwed over to become wealthy" tautologically resulted from "European influences", which suggests that your comment contains a self-contradiction in its first line, wherever you intended to post it.

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

#282
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing is perfect.

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

#284
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.

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

#285
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.

Argentina was a successful cow product exporter, then cow products became cheap elsewhere

Well, not really. The end of the cow-product-based Argentine Golden Age didn't come from US feedlots; those were still decades in the future. It came from the Smoot-Hawley act and its beggar-thy-neighbor brethren worldwide: our economy, which had grown fat from its abundant and fine exports, suddenly found the gates closed to those exports and the drawbridges drawn up, almost everywhere in the world, precipitating the fall of democracy and the Década Infame. Within three years exports had fallen by almost two thirds, an economic disaster in an export-driven economy.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they grind leetcode or are they so cheap you don’t care?

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

So you’re basically paying them US salaries?

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

#287

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 int…

Looks like you’re in Venezuela. How do you get paid by Americans?

Through paypal, im hired as a contractor, have to send invoices and stuff

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

#288

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% remot…

But why do all these companies have to be in america? One often hears about companies hiring remotely, but hardly ever establishing remotely.

[deleted]

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So you’re basically paying them US salaries?

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

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

#290
post #231
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they a…

Capitalism really gave the wealthy a reason to not hurt the up and coming, by requiring the newcomers to pay tribute to the old rich. It's not doing good per se(since capitalism doesn't care if you're doing good or bad, just profitably), just that you can't benefit without also benefiting some already wealthy folks. Thus, the wealthy folks are incentivized to allow the new rich to propser

In a competitive market, if your customers don't think your products do them good, they won't pay for them, so you won't be profitable. If they don't think they do them much good, they won't pay much for them, so you'll be less profitable.

Of course this isn't perfect --- they might be wrong about whether you're doing them good, like Lucky Strikes, and you might have stolen your products or dumped toxic waste or something. And there are lots of principal-agent problems, where the person making the buying decision has no incentive to care whether it turns out to be a good one. And the wealthy get a disproportionate vote. But it's probably a better criterion for whether you're doing good than anything else we can evaluate in real time in practice.

Although getting bank loans is pretty important, and getting wealthy angel investors is essential for some businesses, you can totally get rich by bootstrapping and selling to poor people. No already wealthy folks need be involved --- except where those wealthy folks are politically powerful, but that's a question external to capitalism.

Procter & Gamble sold soap and candles. Walmart sells to almost nobody but poor people. ExxonMobil started out, roughly speaking, as Standard Oil, whose main product was originally kerosene used for lighting and heating people's homes, and now is gasoline, used by everyday people to drive their cars around. (Rockefeller was no exemplar of capitalism, of course; he spent most of his life trying to destroy it because it wasn't profitable enough.) Berkshire Hathaway is generally considered to be the paragon of modern capitalism; it started out as a cotton textiles company, and nowadays its businesses are mostly things like GEICO (car insurance), Dairy Queen (fast food), Fruit of the Loom (cheap underwear), Acme Building Brands (bricks), Shaw Industries (cheap carpet), and Flying J (truck stops). If all wealthy people stopped buying from all of these businesses at once, they'd hardly notice.

It's certainly true, though, that the possibility of buying shares in new businesses reduces the opposition to upstarts. But public ownership is by no means fundamental to capitalism!

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