U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
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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
#2I 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).
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#3It’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 most countries - and hiring outside the US is easier and cheaper: especially when you pay above the local market (but we’ll below the US one).
I’ve been covering this trend from mid 2021 both in my newsletter (The Pragmatic Engineer) and my blog. From all evidence I gathered, we are in the most heated tech hiring market of all time, one that is hotter than during the Dotcom Boom (details in [1]).
Having talked with closer to a hundred tech hiring managers the last six months across all geographies, the consensus is that it will get worse in Q1 2022 than before - and, obviously, this means better for many experienced engineers. And H2 2021 was hot enough with out-of-cycle compensation increases of 5-30% on top of annual raises at many tech companies, across all geographies [2].
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-t...
[2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hi...
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#4I’ve been doing that for 7 years.
They’re* only a little more expensive than India/Eastern Europe. There are enough good developers that speak English good or well enough, but the likelihood of being able to communicate nuanced topics or revisions is the same as anywhere, including US.
(*I literally don’t know which South American countries are committing code, just the hourly rate the firm passes to me)
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#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 to us. But I could see her point.
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#6I’ve been doing that for 7 years. They’re* only a little more expensive than India/Eastern Europe. There are enough good developers that speak English good or well enough, but the likelihood of being able to communicate nuanced topics or revisions is the same as anywhere, including US. (*I literally don’t know which South American countries are committing code, just the hourly rate the firm passes to me)
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Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#7No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some information about the topic.
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#8People underestimate cultural difference and even pretend they don't exist.
Even within a culture there are people who don't fit into the dominant cultural values and way of working. A big part of diversity and inclusion is addressing that.
This becomes an even bigger problem when dealing with other cultures.
And you might find that other cultures don't value diversity and inclusion as much as n American corporate culture and really look down on the way others do things and see there way as the right way.
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#9That is great! Latin american are still suspiciously uncommon in tech so there is definitely a neglected talent pool.
That illustrates one of the few good traits of capitalism: discrimination pushing you to miss on good candidates (women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, etc) is a drop in profit that can be exploited by other companies and that, thus, should disapear with time (at least in theory, in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists...).
Re: U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
#10Disappointed to see no mention of Costa Rica.
At my last company, about half of our dev team was from CR and they kicked ass. They got rid of the army in 1948 and redirected the funds into education, transforming it into a high tech hub.