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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

#41

Post by bobthepanda »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #34
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…

Yeah, it's really interesting but also a huge economic opportunity for countries if they can figure out enough reforms without these people to make the country attractive enough that these people come back with all their experience (and networks) and help boost the economy even further.

Yup. Initial foreign investment in China was mostly driven by Hong Kong and Taiwan (many of these investors were first or second-generation from the mainland), and other parts of the Chinese diaspora.

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

#42

Post by bobthepanda »

novok wrote: post #20
ashtonkem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works on west coast time, it’s easy for me to forget that Latin America is largely east of the continental US. Not an issue for remote work, but something that caught me off guard when I started working with people living in that continent.

Yes that is true, I even worked in brazil with a west coast team for a couple weeks. But it's wayyyyyyyyy better than europe, india or china time zones.

The worst is countries that do not share a Monday-Friday working week. MENA tends to be Sunday-Thurs, so in combination with the time zone it means you can only really do Mon-Wed meetings US time.

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

#43

Post by spamizbad »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #36
spamizbad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company uses Eastern European contractors for certain projects as "staff augmentation". Overall, I would say our experience is positive. There are indeed many experienced devs who do great work. But it does have some drawbacks: 1) 10-hour time difference between West Coast US and, say, Kyiv is pretty big. It's easier on EST people, but on the US side you're going to have to plan on jamming your calendars full of m…

Somewhat unrelated but just a side comment, many Ukrainian folks are really trying to move away from the spelling of Kiev as you did, instead they prefer Kyiv (I was corrected several times for this by Ukrainian friends/colleagues when I got to the region so just thought I'd share). https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...

Noted. Thank you!

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

#44

Post by thatfrenchguy »

tinyhouse wrote: post #30
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…

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.

The US salaries force you to go in more competitive markets though and use your engineers better, because your costs are higher. Salaries in France have been 1/3 of US salaries forever, and yet people don't outsource to French engineers, more like French engineers move to the US.

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

#45

Post by devwastaken »

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…

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 the natural result is the U.S's software dominance will be gone sooner than later. Just like manufacturing we are seeing an exportation of work en mass.

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

#46

Post by colechristensen »

tinyhouse wrote: post #30
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…

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.

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 decisions away from engineers towards management and accomplish this with outsourcing.

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

#47

Post by bkovacev »

yuliyp wrote: post #25
bkovacev wrote: post #21

I have been trying to get US companies to hire from Eastern Europe (mainly south eastern europe). My company would act as a middleman (essentially outsourcing), pay money to the devs which would work directly 1:1 for that company. The devs would be working for us, yet, we would not manage their day to day activities - we'd just act as an HR/recruiting/legal middleman. I have tried with two major outsourcing companies…

It's a bit of a confusing niche you're trying to fill. Outsourcing firms are generally providing the HR/recruiting/legal role as their specialty. That they wouldn't want to provide another company a cut when they can do this just fine themselves is unsurprising.

True, it's a hard niche to fill, and yup, slightly confusing even. We'd aim for development companies within the US that have some "outsourcing" presence around the world, but have not tapped into Eastern Europe yet. What we're really looking to do is help developers get connected to the US companies and get paid better and not be looked at as contractors, but FTE with benefits.

An example - in Serbia and Slovenia you arrange a net salary, and the company pays the taxes/insurance etc on top of net salary (usually around 50-60%). So for a senior salary in Serbia of around 4k euros. you're looking at the company paying around 6-7k euros. For a contractor (as a sole proprietor) you can make at most 50k euros a year and then you pay benefits that are minimum 300e. If you go above that you pay 10% tax on profit + 15% personal income tax. You can choose to still pay yourself salary and 50-60% on top of that, and you will most likely not pay yourself a big salary, but take the profit and pay the 15%.

What we would try to accomplish is:

- Not have developer as a contractor, but as an FTE

- Create a pipeline of US based companies

- Bump the salary for devs for 25%-30% -> pay the taxes/pension (30k+ more)

- Take a 15% of the annual salary (20-30k)

- Provide cheap senior/staff/principle devs that are cheaper than the same devs, but same or similar quality

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

#48

Post by Zaskoda »

I saw this first hand last Spring when I was visiting family in Mexico. One of my sister's friends there is a web developer and we really hit it off. A native born Mexican, he told me about how he works for a tech company out of Utah, but through a locally owned company. He then went on to explain that this is the nature of his entire company and that this is a popular trend in the industry there. I honestly couldn't be happier for them, not sure he could have made that good of a living doing only local work.

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

#50

Post by jorblumesea »

krasin wrote: post #2

I am surprised that it took so long to realize that hiring people in the same time zone is better for productivity. I am saying it as someone who spent N years working for an American company from Moscow (~11 hours difference) and had to sleep in the office frequently to get at least some things done (like, code reviews approved by the team members in the main office).

Language/education/infrastructure barrier in Latin America, for some countries at least. Situation is improving as of late but a large skill gap both in terms of education and foreign lang skills (English). Hiring in India was painful for some reasons, but everyone spoke English and education was top level due to intense competition.

Most of Latin America is only roughly overlapping with US timezones. The western most countries (Ecuador for example) are basically EST time, but Brazil is closer to GMT.

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