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Comment by polycaster | Hacker News Reader

From my personal experience I think that the most challenging factor with outsourcing is in fact the time zone.

Being situated in Germany I see many webdev jobs being outsourced about 1 hour to the east and about all the way down to South Africa and Mauritius („Cyber Island”).

This are the projects that work like normal. Then of course the vast majority is outsourced to contractors in India or China – but frankly communication in these projects has always been a bummer.

But then again, it's just my own bubble and probably depends heavily on the type of work and the frequency of communication involved.

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The North American equivalent is Latin America. I’m in consulting, and every new project has some set of near shore resources billed much lower than their North American counterparts. In most cases the only discernible difference is proficiency in English.

I remember after "corralito" a lot of US companies started opening their CoE (center of excelence) in Argentina because wages were really low, and they could hire easily.

I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than pesos.

>I heard (not sure if it is true) people wanted to be paid in USD because car loans were denominated in dollars rather than pesos.

Wikipedia says that 60% of bank loans in neighboring Uruguay are in US dollars, so I am not surprised to hear that about Argentina, a country that has for years had an unofficial "blue dollar" exchange rate with the US$ (<https://www.coha.org/blue-dollar-black-market-the-illegal-ex...>) that is very, very different from the official one.

My experience has been different. Ive found it difficult to find senior people. Junior and mid level people abound, but there are precious few qualified seniors.

I think it's the nature of the market. There isn't as much demand to outsource senior roles, so the market just doesn't produce a lot of them.

This is changing and will change. There are more startups and more access to startups with great products that will create the next generation of tech-stars.

This was not true 20 years ago where most of the work was software factories and nickel/diming big-cos

I've seen this trend as well. There's this interesting double trend of upward costs on senior resources and downward costs on junior resources.

you're right about the time zone and the language barrier... am from Chile and working for foreign projects is always a headache

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