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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

#81

Post by soneca »

> ” If someone is very money-driven, there’s nothing we can do.”

I am very far from “very money-driven”. I worked for a long time in the non-profit sector that would pay much less than mostly any of my other careers options. Then I changed to software development.

I work for an American company from Brazil. I earn 5 times more (after taxes) that what I would likely earn in a local well-paying company for my level of experience. 3 times if I was lucky and good at negotiation.

And think that is 3 times multiplication of already high-paying job. So it is a LOT of money. There is just not much a company can do around here until the demand for tech talent in the US decrease a little.

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

#82

Post by colechristensen »

downut wrote: post #70
colechristensen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivia…

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 piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster.

It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.

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

#83

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ironmagma wrote: post #64
vanusa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I worked for a company where it worked beautifully; the remote folks (who were very carefully picked) meshed perfectly with the team (and better than many of the native folks). It's an eternal topic on HN of course. Whether it works or not seems to depend on multiple factors (not simply language issues, or remote versus local), in my view.

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").

I can hardly imagine that situation working out if the company you acquired were in the US.

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

#84

Post by csomar »

no_wizard wrote: post #74
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…

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 no…

While simple CRUD apps are not technically challenging; the hard part of doing these is figuring out the specs and communicating with the client. I can see how this can go wrong with offshore clients (time difference, cultural difference, language difference, only remote). There could be a market for local agencies outsourcing tech work (and even that has to be done carefully). But clients directly outsourcing to off-shore agencies, that spell trouble.

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

#86

Post by chrisseaton »

Accujack wrote: post #79
chrisseaton wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in e-commerce at Shopify. My company is building some great developer experience stuff for the long-term like some truly excellent cloud-development environments. My previous company, Oracle, was developing an entirely new kind of language virtual-machine to run the programming languages of the future as well. I see this in many places.

That's just long term product planning. The rest of the people here are talking about long term employee development - making your employees more valuable so they produce better products rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced.

> rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced

But employers are paying more and more than ever before?

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

#87

Post by soneca »

jviotti wrote: post #54

I think this article underestimates the difficulty of finding great talent in Latin America as a remote company. Everybody in Latin America wants to work remotely at foreign companies, yet few actually do in practice. I was born and raised in Argentina, but studied and worked abroad (UK) and never was in the Latin American market. As an Engineering Lead at a London-based startup, I interviewed tons of software engine…

I worked as a software developer in one company in Brazil and in three American companies. The skill gap was non-existent. I could see the same level of talent in both places.

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

#88

Post by csomar »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #28
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…

Anecdata but in my experience it's definitely true in Africa, I did a project for a Cameroonian tech company recently and they couldn't afford to compete with major tech co's with remote roles which is where anyone decent and semi-senior went. They ended up with a mishmash tech team in Algeria and Ukraine mostly although they would have much preferred to hire local. I heard this story many times in the tech community…

Same in Tunisia. Remote and France have swooped practically most of the tech talent. You are forced with either mediocre developers or to pay EU rates.

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

#89

Post by nemo44x »

marvin wrote: post #76
nemo44x wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve hired French engineers in France and they’ve done great work. Hard workers too. But the impression France has is probably a turn off for many. There are other problems too like it taking 3 months for a new French hire to start. Getting rid of them is extremely difficult as well. There are lots of additional taxes you have to pay the French government too. There’s just so much risk in hiring there that you’re bet…

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…

What I mean by that is how worker protection laws from the Industrial Age and which apply to hourly wage employees are applied to professional workers that have autonomy and other attributes that make them very different from hourly workers.

The USA has a concept of an “exempt” and “nonexempt” worker and a series of questions that determine this status. In general, hourly workers (nonexempt) get many protections encoded into law that professionals don’t. And professionals don't want them except for a very small minority of oddballs that want to unionize.

So in essence, applying the same set of outdated rules to everyone. It even makes it hard to compete with colleagues for promotions if your hours are limited. Of course the French engineers I had lied to the government about hours worked as they wanted to maximize bonuses, stock grants, and promotions.

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

#90

Post by jimbob45 »

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…

On the ground, this seems to be demonstrably false. I have numerous current and former coworkers that would love opportunities elsewhere.

It’s the recruiters who are the problem. If you’re looking for a C# dev and you put “5 years Node.JS experience minimum”, then not only are you going to miss out on some great, if not the best, developers, but you’re much less likely to hire the man you actually want.

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