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

I haven't seen any company do that in a very long time. What industry are you working in?

The truth is that most software isn’t all that special. For the average business that can accelerate their processes with CRUD apps you don’t need to do much in the name of bespoke work. I can have a standard run of the mill CRUD app up in like a week or maybe if sufficiently complex a month or so - with proper tests. That’s the kind of work I’m seeing outsourced in droves typically.

The kind of work I actually do nowadays I don’t see getting outsourced so easily. This is core architecture and fundamental differentiation that the business sees as key to product and core success. You’d be highly unwise to outsource that.

An experienced developer that can produce high quality work but can accept a lower salary (nominal to local markets of the employer not the developer) based on geographical concerns? You can make a lot of money with those CRUD contracts I imagine

Edit: this all assumes someone competent is overseeing the work and someone that understands the technical things involved in the overall project to steer it know what they’re doing too

Haha, modern employment law :D You'd cause hilarity if you used that expression anywhere in the Scandinavian public discourse, or at least the Norwegian. You'd get tomatoes thrown at you and no one would listen to a single word.

Not that I necessarily disagree with you or miss your point, but this is a very strong ideological divide. It's not about modern vs. archaic unless you posit that employment law that protects employees is such a detriment to an economy's effectiveness that it's effectively obsolete.

Maybe at some point it will be a question of what economies actually manage to get things done and thrive and those who don't, but that's the kind of long-term, almost geopolitical shift that happens over decades at the least.

E.g. no one who wants a position of power would advocate for a pure planned economy today, rather than a market economy. I sort of doubt that employee protections are such a millstone around the neck that they will go the same way, but who knows.

It's an interesting question as you see a tendency of economies with less protections and higher salary luring away lots of really high performers.

>It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies.

Translation: Most tech companies are addicted to cheap labor, either through exploiting new graduates or handing out potentially worthless stock options. They won't choose to reduce their profits regardless of what happens.

Very few startups "need" to hire less experienced people, mostly the ones that do just haven't got a viable business model. The ones that can't afford to hire the people they need at a reasonable salary for the work they expect shouldn't exist. They're just machines for turning venture capital into personal wealth for the founders as they exploit their employees then sell out.

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 Slack, etc. The timezone difference to India makes this virtually impossible, so that if you ARE outsourcing to India the model is totally different and you have to outsource a very different type of work. Plus, since the time zones are so off, the situation sucks for everyone - someone is either staying up very late or getting up very early. These days I refuse jobs where coordination with India is required, because it's just not worth sacrificing other parts of my life for it, especially when it's easy to get a job where this is not necessary.

2. In general, I have found there to be less of a cultural issue of Latin American developers proactively speaking up and letting us know concerns/potential issues than their Indian counterparts. One of the biggest issues we had many years ago is that, while we hired developers in India that were fantastic technically, they were loath to inform us of problems or schedule slip until it was too late; in general, there was a culture of "over-deference" which proved to be extremely detrimental. If anyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, it was very similar to what he discusses about Korean Airlines' cockpit culture.