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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

#291

Post by kragen »

markdown wrote: post #254
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…

Poaching would be the more correct word to use.

That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.

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

#292

Post by kragen »

atleta wrote: post #274
kragen wrote: 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…

You're probably right that it doesn't come from Catholicism, but it still can be based on it. I.e. be explained by it, used as a motivation for the said behaviour. Religions are quite malleable, Christianity (in general) is no different. Full of contradictions that open the possibilities of quite different interpretations by emphasizing one or the other of the contradicting pieces of informations. So while what you s…

Oh, agreed! And you can't read the story of the dude kicking the moneychangers out of the temple without feeling that he wasn't super enthusiastic about commerce.

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

#293

Post by Jailbird »

kragen wrote: post #291
markdown wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poaching would be the more correct word to use.

That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.

The word poach can be used more generally.

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

#294

Post by kragen »

Jailbird wrote: post #293
kragen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.

The word poach can be used more generally.

Yes, any word can be used metaphorically. I just don't like the metaphor in this case.

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

#295

Post by giantg2 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #271
giantg2 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Did you read your link? > Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap." > Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so" in the story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy. The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation…

Yep.

"Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so" in the story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy. The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation","

Not to mention, it's not a scientific law, but just an adage. Even then, when there's a higher barrier to entry the law is thought not to apply (such as technical skills required to create professional software).

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

#296

Post by tambeb »

pcurve wrote: post #164
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…

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, dev…

I went to Brazil with some friends for the World Cup in 2014. For the bigger, more important matches the entire country left work early and everything (except for bars, etc.) closed down for the day. Quite literally.

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

#297

Post by pc86 »

EVdotIO wrote: post #123
pc86 wrote: 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 have about a decade of real professional coding experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can write code. I can count on one finger the number of interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch. There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah and the deafening silence of _any_ intere…

What do you mean by "someone like me?" Your reality is not any reality I've experienced.

I work for a company nobody here has heard of, working on a boring tech stack. Absolutely nothing I do day to day would make into any blog post, let alone anything on HN. I, and my ~dozen or so coworkers, get at least one cold recruiter contact a week. Obviously most of them are garbage. But we've all gotten the random contact from an Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook recruiter. The interviews are available.

YC runs workatastartup.com - I submitted my resume and a two-sentence intro to 5 or 6 companies and I think I got an interview at all but one. The interview is the easy part, and if you can't even get that with a decade of programming experience, you're getting caught in some arbitrary filter. Which is to say, respectfully, you're doing something wrong because that's simply not what the market is right now. Or, you're not quite as qualified as you think you are.

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

#298

Post by Wiseacre »

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…

Quite a few confederate flags still fly in relatively urban/suburban Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. So not quite as liberal as you think.

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

#299

Post by pc86 »

lxxpxlxxxx wrote: post #287
seizethecheese wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the question was more about how your employers are violating US sanctions against your country.

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

#300

Post by tartoran »

kragen wrote: post #294
Jailbird wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word poach can be used more generally.

Yes, any word can be used metaphorically. I just don't like the metaphor in this case.

Poaching is used across the industry for workforce quite commonly
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