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.
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, developers in Brail were... a bit harder to reach. no joke. lol.
This is absolutely true during a World Cup
In the past, we worked with HP's consulting arm, and they moved us to their Costa Rica workforce because time zones matched up better. I think both sides were happier on that.
Multiple meetings with random times between 0Z and 24Z in the same day makes it hard to plan on when to sleep.
One week and one interview later I had a job (applied to like 5 companies max) making $3200/month as entry level.
To be honest I would have taken those local jobs but after such success with us companies I don't think I can afford it anymore.
Anyway If someone needs a frontend dev, just hmu, email on profile
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).
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.
As for timezone, Trinidad and Tobago is EST+1, Lima (Peru) is EST, and Brazil is EST+2. That gives much more workday overlap than even Western Europe.
It’s not just contractors either. With tools like remote.com, you can hire FTEs almost anywhere.
There is no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of adaptable companies.
I’ve been preaching this for years, but the new way is here. It’s all about async, 100% remote, no HQ, no excessive hiring, no in person meetings, no or limited meetings in general. Pay your staff 20% more than what they’d normally get and they won’t complain about not having ping pong or after work bonding events. Trust me it works.
Nowadays, with remote work, people are being paid handsomely and spending their money in their home countries.
Anecdotally, I'm seeing that happening a lot with dev friends in Rio de Janeiro. People are using money earned in the US to help the local economy. They still interact with local universities and contribute to local projects. Cool stuff.
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.
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.
- 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").
Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.
For example, here in Argentina, you are required to convert your earnings immediately into pesos at the official rate, which is half the real rate. That's pillaging. In effect this is a 50% export tariff, used not to provide government services but to subsidize importation and travel abroad for rich Argentines, making most exportation wildly unprofitable; programming services have low enough costs that they can still remain afloat, at least until the programmers move abroad, but any export business with a substantial cost of sales is unviable. Bitcoin is a common way for such developers to get paid here in Argentina. I don't know about other countries.
Argentina has a strong crab-bucket or zero-sum mentality, justified by the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people, so as long as the government can direct attention to the exporters instead of the importers, there's strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.
It's probably true that people like López Conde can get away with paying their employees 20% of the market rate as long as those employees don't speak English --- but probably not for very long. Spanish is the most-spoken second language in every state in the US, and in New Mexico where I grew up half the population speaks it.
> Governments often also see this as "pillaging", since they're answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit. In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.
There are salary differences w.r.t. Europe and the US as well but no one uses such language.
Also, though, the US does have a history of actually pillaging Latin American countries. Like, with soldiers. By contrast, the last time the US invaded Europe there was a surprising lack of pillaging.
Is this a symptom/cause of the crab-bucket mentality? It is here in Uruguay, as well, and I hold it myself, to my own detriment.
Is there a name for this? I want to read about it and see if I can change my mind, grow a bit.
Thank you
If the only way the rich got rich is by screwing over people, then I’m justified in not working hard, not being ingenuous, not being diligent because what good does it make anyway.
(Negative feedback systems in general do this weird interchange of cause and effect. An op-amp's inputs are kept at the same voltage because they're its inputs. It's a real mindfuck, in a good way.)
More generally, throughout history, most people who got rich did get that way by screwing over other people; I mean that's literally how warfare works, by harming the opposing forces enough to get them to submit, and in feudal systems (and quasi-feudal systems like the Argentine system) that's how you gain power and wealth. Feudal nobles and partisan politicians are whoever was historically best at harming the opposing forces. Most of human history isn't that, of course, because everyday life always works by cooperation and goodwill, but most of the parts of history that got written down were people competing to hurt each other.
The crab-bucket mentality is very helpful to politicians because it prevents upstart businesses (and regions, and cities) from creating alternative centers of power that could compete with the established order.
Capitalism was the decisive break with that tradition, in which people compete by doing the most good for their customers instead of harm to whoever their enemies are at the moment; but nothing in capitalism prevents powerful and rich people from hurting whoever they see as their opposition, except that it's unprofitable to spend too much on hurting them, and if you choose poorly they may be able to hurt you back, which is even more unprofitable. And whoever is powerful can use that power for harm, too, and being human, they usually do. Still, by changing the criterion for wealth from doing harm to doing good, capitalism changed the incentives enormously.
Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers, not creators or merchants. Even today in Argentina it's considered far nobler to be an escribano or a lawyer than a physicist, a programmer, or a businessman --- but the real national heroes are football players! Pure zero-sum players.
Physicians are at least somewhat honored, but Favaloro still committed suicide because of the lack of support for his work, and Diego Maradona is far more honored for cheating at football and raping teenagers (and, to be fair, playing football too) than Esteban Maradona is for his lifetime spent on eradicating Chagas disease and studies in anthropology and biology.
If your schooling was free, then to some degree you do "owe" working locally in order to give something back for that.
Of course, if it's not part of an agreement you signed before you started your studies or they don't enforce it, then I guess that's that.
So, no, I don't think people "owe" working locally. If they owe anything in exchange for free education, it's realizing their full human potential and being generous with their time and money.
Now, go donate to Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, so the next generation can have free education not only in Argentina but everywhere in the world that it's legal.
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.
Some anecdotal highlights:
- great time zone overlap with US business hours
- very very good English
- very strong engineers who actually take ownership of the products we’re working on
- leadership aspirations and drive - I’ve promoted a few folks to team lead positions
- shared culture that works in a similar way to US culture
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...
If a student enters a collegiate program with some interest or experience in programming, then they're likely to come out of it with solid skills and find some opportunities. If an employer has the resources to select from the best that universities have to offer, then they can find great candidates.
But for us that aren't working for FAANG, a university degree doesn't really tell us much, and certainly tells us a lot less than a portfolio of projects or work experience.
This is still fundamentally a hiring problem. There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. A CS degree sure ain't it.
I feel like companies are investing even more in the long term than ever before, building increasingly ambitious infrastructure projects.
I don't see what you see at all.
You see the same at other smaller companies who will rather hire a student or a fresh graduate because it's much cheaper (and more available).
Not a graduate but instead an industry veteran. If what you say is accurate then Im happy to have my bias of “maybe it’s time I go the mercenary route” confirmed.
Surely the market is there, right?
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.
Hiring is a people skill, not an algorithm skill.
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.
I'm not sure if it's a sustainability issue or tactic to eek out every dollar possible given the landscape. I suspect it's the latter. I'll bet most don't do the leet code interviews for offshore developers though.
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.
Not to many, Many still believe that remote work for programmers simply means lower cost of living for them while keeping their high salaries...
They are about the learn the lesson US steal workers, and other blue collar works in many American industries did when globalization hit them....
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
No, there's not. There's a shortage of cheap experienced software engineers in the US.
Companies don't want to hire generic software engineers, there is a huge demand for software engineering skill sets that are extremely difficult to learn, and which can only be acquired after years of diligent effort and experience. This is where the gap is and no amount of paying more will create a larger supply. Some software engineering expertise is already paying in excess of $1,000,000, and there are still severe shortages. That's not a "wage shortage" unless you expect me to believe that software engineers are choosing to grind away on ERP software for $150k instead.
The highest paying software engineering skill sets are the most difficult ones to fill. Software engineering skill sets are not fungible. The highest paid ones are often those with the least elastic supply.
I posit that the "hot" market is the marker of inflation. The money running around leads to more competition for talents and competitive fields is where, I assume, inflation should show up most easily.
I know I might sound anti-worker, I swear I am not, I just attempt to get as close to the truth as my small mind allows me.
As for people who don't know how to code retraining to be SWEs - since becoming a "senior software engineer" takes at least 5 years, you'd have to wait 5 years to see a result, irrespective of how much you increase the wages.
The question is, how inelastic is supply? "Labor of a senior software developer" isn't like "a widget" in that you can pretty simply create more of them. It takes years and special training to create senior software developers.
This means the supply is inelastic over the short term, although in the long term more people get the education to become one.
That means that doubling salaries might not have the effect you predict.
But let’s say there are 100 heart transplant specialists in the US getting paid $1M per year, but you need 200.
You can increase their wages as high as you want and you can’t create 100 of them out of thin air.
I’d suggest for highly technical roles, shortages can exist.
Unskilled or semi-skilled labor is a better fit for your statement.
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 protectionism expand from blue collar politics into white collar politics.
And there's a lot of solid, affordable schools in the heartland too. So with only a 1-2 hour TZ difference regardless of which coast your main offices are in, you get employees that cost 10-25% as much but are culturally and logistically extremely similar.
Also worth noting, on the topic of culture, that while the heartland votes red, it's mostly just because of how the counties work. Most of the population is still fairly liberal, especially the portion with a college degree. And programmers are usually the liberal anarchy types anyway, on top of that.
I don't know about that. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and I've lived here most of my life (apart from a little over three years in the Seattle area while working at Microsoft). I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, and my parents have voted Republican for as far back as I remember. I rejected both their religion and their politics in my early 30s, but IMO, I did some of my best programming work before that. So if remote work really takes off, you might be surprised.
Addendum: I did get a college education, but it was from Wichita State University; for reasons having nothing to do with religion or culture, I was slow to leave home. So maybe I'm just an outlier that adds nothing worthwhile to this discussion.
You already have high protectionism of white collar since ~2015 or 2016, when chance of getting H1B outside of wholesale Indian consultancies became very low.
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 engineers who were applying remotely from all over South America and Central America. However, we didn't hire more than a bunch of Latin American engineers compared to dozens of Europeans and North Americans. The skill gap was pretty noticeable.
I've observed similar things with friends/family in South America which are into engineering. They find it very hard to be qualified enough to get offers from remote companies/startups.
Argentina and Brazil's engineering talent is _outstanding_, and these people are not settling for mediocre companies or mediocre salaries.
I've even done several hiring intensives for people from there 3 or 4 years ago.
Most people that I know of are hired through companies that does long term staff augmentation or permanent contract work. I am one of those folks, I left my job at a Brazilian startup a month ago and now work as an Engineering Manager at https://rightbalance.io/.
Disclaimer: among other things, I am doing the hiring of senior people in LATAM for US companies, if you are in LATAM, and wants to apply, the interview will be with me and I always give feedback at the end of interview.
After seeing this I realized how badly underpaid I am.
I work full stack, have pretty deep experience using postgresql and node js. So if thats something you find useful, don't hesitate to contact me. My email is my user name @Hotmail
Neither outsourcing nor a traditional recruiting agency. We're a talent platform that helps you source, vet, hire, and manage full-time dedicated engineers in Latin America.
We handle everything including payroll and compliance.
Disclaimer: I work for Revelo.
If you pay US salaries, by mentioning salary upfront you will have a lot of interest. If you pay even top 1% Brazilian salary, they will probably stay where they are.
I wanted to rescind the offer, but my manager told me to give her chance, because of the market (lets see how she will do for first month).
I already received 2x base offer elsewhere as well, I will probably reject it, as I think I can get even more.
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...).
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)
Changelog Master Feed: Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition (Founders Talk #78) https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78
In the short term, we're having a fun little arbitrage event by working remotely with the top salaries, but why would that continue to last in 5+ year timeframes? Of course if you like in person work it won't be an issue, but I don't plan on being in an office for the rest of my life.
I'm less hopeful for people in the leftmost peak or middle peaks. For decades tech has been slowly eating its low-end. Think of all the webmasters of the 90s made obsolete by sites like Squarespace, the work has more or less been completely deskilled. I think that trend will continue.
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
However this new method of just "move" is even more ignorant, you can not move your way in to a low enough cost of living to compete with nations that pay below US min wages.... This is doubly true when there is a huge push to increase those minimum wages...
So Learn to code from the 90's has become if you do not like it leave... nice
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 meetings between 7:30-10:30am.
2) Because you have fewer "business hours" between two, you need product, project, and engineering management to operate in a fairly well-oiled manner with more stuff spelled-out up-front, otherwise your team across the pond is stuck until the next day for some answer. Also, if your org even attempts to adopt "agile" this communication breakdown will murder your velocity; you're better off doing Waterfall.
3) They cannot be on-call to troubleshoot product issues during US business hours. This makes the business-side uneasy
4) Higher churn-rate than domestic engineers. Mostly over salary; this falls squarely at the feet of the "middleman" who undercuts their engineers. We attempt to ameliorate this by giving them feedback on employees who they should focus on retaining but IME they just view their talent as widgets rather than craftsmen. I've seen several good devs leave over money we'd have gladly paid them but their contracting org refused.
5) Speaking of higher churn rate: Onboarding can be more painful, again because of the TZ difference as well as certain cultural issues.
None of these are deal-breakers. But it's easy to understand why a company might be willing to pay 50-100% more to avoid these concerns.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...
2) Spot on - Agile does not work well in such environment, I have seen it first hand twice. I feel that with senior/staff level devs, you can expect and should get higher level of autonomy and less hand-holding, so in a solid project oriented company, I do feel that fewer "business hours overlap" would impact much. I do feel that at least 3, preferably more hours should be reserved for meetings / overlap.
3) I'd argue about that one, haha. I have been on-call troubleshooting production at 2-3am my time, not once, but multiple times. For a great employer, with proper compensation and benefits, you'd be surprised what devs from this area would do!
4) YES! Companies are greedy. However, they do have to pay pension/insurance on the hourly rate they give to the dev, think 50-60%, but they don't want to give away their cut at all, it seems to be non-negotiable flat fee, which is deal breaking. Another point is that Microsoft and other big brand outsourcing names are coming to EE and stealing away the workforce.
Disclaimer - I work as a senior/staff level dev with high base salary and equity, so my experience may be a bit skewed.
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
So I've been thinking for a while that it's actually a pretty bad situation for local companies who want to develop either custom software (internal or a product) or the ones that have local clients and try to hire local talent. They are, in part, competing with US and Western European companies. And while 10 or even 5 years ago I didn't know to many people who did this, it has accelerated quite a bit.
I'm running a largish (~15k people) job board group on Facebook and I saw the pretty rapid raise in the salaries offered to people. Also, the increase that one can expect in the first 5 years is pretty steep, 200-300%. Meaning that the average senior level salary offers are about 2-3x as high as the entry level ones. (And senior apparently means 5 years in this context.) I'm not sure about the US situation (especially not the entry level salaries), but it seems that at least in part it's about the fact that as a senior you can find a remote job pretty easily.
And white-collar Americans in tech will finally get to suffer along with the rest of the country as the American system of "spend more for a worse life". It shouldn't be so hard to keep a basic middle-class lifestyle, with historically low inflation, but it is.
In my country, the retail industry dreads Amazon's looming expansion. They've started hiring ex-Amazonians to try to catch up. I wonder if they've raised the salaries to match.
Wow, that's crazy. As a (senior?) software engineer based in Chile who was recently hired by an American company for around $3.5k/mo (that was my offer) I am now feeling underpaid. :)
Assuming that this information is correct, I am now wondering how much I could get away with next time around...
There are two types of American companies hiring devs from LatAm. The ones that are actively recruiting in LatAm and the ones that just hire remote and don’t mind you are out of the US.
The actively recruiting ones are trying to make the salary arbitrage work in their favor. They will offer top 1% salary of the local market. Which is a lot lower than American labor market for tech. That’s probably what you got.
Then there are those that just hire remotely and don’t mind being outside of the US. They are basically the same as in the US. They don’t recruit in LatAm. They are also small companies. You don’t find them on LinkedIn or through recruiters. You find them on AngeList and HN’s Who is Hiring. Look for those and it will not be hard to find a job paying a senior $10k a month (more depending on experience, luck, and negotiation). Those $15k seems to be the ceiling though, FAANG don’t hire like this
Honestly, this should concern everyone who lives in the US. I remember the big push for remote work being the "new normal" and thinking how this would bite people who live in more expensive areas. Well... here you go.
They don't need to be; first, because wages aren't the whole cost of employment, and second because the measure being maximized is value minus cost, not value divided by cost.
Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.
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.
I have worked with many in Latin America (Costa Rica and Mexico in particular) and cultural differences (with respect to work) have never come up. They seem extremely "Americanized", or perhaps the differences aren't there in their own native cultures either. It's like talking to an American with a slight accent.
> 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.
Unless they have a proclivity for wearing red hats or being out of the house Sunday mornings [0]. U.S. diversity & inclusion amounts to parading around people with different skin colors that think exactly like a West Coast White Liberal.
[0] Tongue-in-cheek reference: Silicon Valley, Season 5, Episode 4
The tech industry is VERY used to working with people from multiple cultures and backgrounds. Teams where people are immigrants from 5 different countries is fairly common.
For example Eastern Europe is getting a lot of outsourcing. Yet there’s zero d&i initiatives targeting that region.
Same goes for Africa. I’ve seen zero d&i initiatives To better integrate those living in Africa.
