U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
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
These articles on Venezuela & crypto are easy to find: - https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/09/crypto-remittances-are-a-l...
Venezuela is banned on wise and many/most banking apps. https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/....
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.
https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?country...
Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and then...why not 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.
What drives the price of real state up is lack of new developments, low interest rates, and instutional investors using the housing market as a security instrument. The same thing can happen all over the world and is happening in the US and Canada at an alarming rate.
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.
But there is this deeply rooted notion that software engineers are not supposed to make as much a judge, a doctor or a higher-rank bureaucrat of the public sector. The current bewildering is more cultural than anything else.
There's this notion that doctors are well paid but they're not. It's just that every other profession is incredibly undervalued and should be paid more.
The doctors I know still make many times more than a software engineer with a remote job. And they deserve it.
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").
A good engineer in Latam might work below market rate for a couple of years, then they realize their market value and stop working at a discount.
Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
For eg. I've had a US customer not pay a pretty big invoice and it was too costly in terms of time and money to pursue. I had no recourse. So I just ate the loss.
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.
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.
It kind of all falls apart when even the relatively wealthy (like me) recognize there isn't much reason for them to be so much more successful than the people they grew up with.
(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.
It's not doing good per se(since capitalism doesn't care if you're doing good or bad, just profitably), just that you can't benefit without also benefiting some already wealthy folks. Thus, the wealthy folks are incentivized to allow the new rich to propser
Of course this isn't perfect --- they might be wrong about whether you're doing them good, like Lucky Strikes, and you might have stolen your products or dumped toxic waste or something. And there are lots of principal-agent problems, where the person making the buying decision has no incentive to care whether it turns out to be a good one. And the wealthy get a disproportionate vote. But it's probably a better criterion for whether you're doing good than anything else we can evaluate in real time in practice.
Although getting bank loans is pretty important, and getting wealthy angel investors is essential for some businesses, you can totally get rich by bootstrapping and selling to poor people. No already wealthy folks need be involved --- except where those wealthy folks are politically powerful, but that's a question external to capitalism.
Procter & Gamble sold soap and candles. Walmart sells to almost nobody but poor people. ExxonMobil started out, roughly speaking, as Standard Oil, whose main product was originally kerosene used for lighting and heating people's homes, and now is gasoline, used by everyday people to drive their cars around. (Rockefeller was no exemplar of capitalism, of course; he spent most of his life trying to destroy it because it wasn't profitable enough.) Berkshire Hathaway is generally considered to be the paragon of modern capitalism; it started out as a cotton textiles company, and nowadays its businesses are mostly things like GEICO (car insurance), Dairy Queen (fast food), Fruit of the Loom (cheap underwear), Acme Building Brands (bricks), Shaw Industries (cheap carpet), and Flying J (truck stops). If all wealthy people stopped buying from all of these businesses at once, they'd hardly notice.
It's certainly true, though, that the possibility of buying shares in new businesses reduces the opposition to upstarts. But public ownership is by no means fundamental to capitalism!
Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
Perón... is hard to pin down. Gabriel Garcia Márquez has quite correctly pointed out that peronism spans the spectrum from far-left to far-right. People tend to project on Perón what they wish to see. Fortunately Perón is far in the past now.
Perón is hard to pin down: he adopted the most popular socialist policies with even greater enthusiasm than Hitler did. It's true that he welcomed fleeing Nazis, but he also welcomed fleeing Jews. The clearest aspect of his political alignment is that he was authoritarian and anti-elitist. But I think it's a clear mistake to identify him as a "left-wing populist".
As for the 19 teens, that's when Argentina was at its richest.
So was FDR. In fact, FDR openly modeled his economic reforms on fascist Italy also. Today he is still held up as one of the most famous left-wing American politicans. Absolutely no one claims he was right wing.
Again, this is just more of the same. Before WWII, "National Socialism" was the future of the world and supported by leftists everywhere. The Nazis worked closely with both the Soviets and the Chinese. For the first 2 years of WWII, the Soviets and the Nazis were on the same side taking on the whole of Europe together. After the war it "wasn't real socialism."
>. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party
Killing each other is what left wingers are famous for. In Soviet Russia the Trotskyites accused the Stalinists of being right wing and they both spent a lot of effort trying to kill each other. This doesn't mean that Stalin was actually right wing, it just means that this is how the left talks - all hyperbole, no reality.
The rest of your comment is Holocaust-denialist-level pseudohistory, as is obvious to anyone who reads literally anything from the time period or anything about it by real researchers or talks to anyone who lived through it.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/gabriel-garcia-marquez-ou...
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.
There is, by and large, no appreciation in Latin America for the actual long-term benefits of property rights, such as, for instance, letting average people obtain formal title over the land that they might currently be holding/homesteading informally in a kind of adverse possession. Of course the lack of this acknowlegdement leads to all sorts of power imbalances, and predictable tensions as some try to push back without addressing the actual underlying issues.
As a Catholic, this is news to me. Is this some peculiarity of Latin American Catholics? I'm not seeing anything supporting this view in what appears to be the relevant portion of the Catechism[1]. Sure, it says that wages should support human dignity, but that’s hardly price-fixing.
d. Justice
201. Justice is a value that accompanies the exercise of the corresponding cardinal moral virtue[441]. According to its most classic formulation, it “consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbour”[442]. From a subjective point of view, justice is translated into behaviour that is based on the will to recognize the other as a person, while, from an objective point of view, it constitutes the decisive criteria of morality in the intersubjective and social sphere[443].
The Church's social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice[444]. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice[445], which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions[446].
202. Justice is particularly important in the present-day context, where the individual value of the person, his dignity and his rights — despite proclaimed intentions — are seriously threatened by the widespread tendency to make exclusive use of criteria of utility and ownership. Justice too, on the basis of these criteria, is considered in a reductionist manner, whereas it acquires a fuller and more authentic meaning in Christian anthropology. Justice, in fact, is not merely a simple human convention, because what is “just” is not first determined by the law but by the profound identity of the human being[447].
203. The full truth about man makes it possible to move beyond a contractualistic vision of justice, which is a reductionist vision, and to open up also for justice the new horizon of solidarity and love. “By itself, justice is not enough. Indeed, it can even betray itself, unless it is open to that deeper power which is love”[448]. In fact, the Church's social doctrine places alongside the value of justice that of solidarity, in that it is the privileged way of peace. If peace is the fruit of justice, “today one could say, with the same exactness and the same power of biblical inspiration (cf. Is 32:17; Jas 3:18): Opus solidaritatis pax, peace as the fruit of solidarity”[449]. The goal of peace, in fact, “will certainly be achieved through the putting into effect of social and international justice, but also through the practice of the virtues which favour togetherness, and which teach us to live in unity, so as to build in unity, by giving and receiving, a new society and a better world”[450].
This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft.
In any case, I think "the experiences of people that the Europeans screwed over to become wealthy" tautologically resulted from "European influences", which suggests that your comment contains a self-contradiction in its first line, wherever you intended to post it.
So while what you say sounds right, at the same time Jesus talked a lot about social justice and how one should help the poor and also, famously how the rich man has less of a chance to get to the kingdom of god than a camel to go through the eye of a needle. (Which, AFAIK, he said to a rich men when he was reluctant to give away his wealth to the poor in a bet to live a life that leads him to the heaven.)
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.
> 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.
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...
> the issue we have with outsourced work is subpar English communication.
If you have good English command, you are already worth something on the Internet. Also, someone not from an English speaking country will need to pick up English by himself and practice frequently.
Historically, it was a response to the argument that science fiction was a genre that didn't deserve to have any attention paid to it, because look how awful some science fiction books were. Sturgeon's response was that most science fiction books were terrible for the same reason that most work in every other genre, past, present, or future, is terrible.
> Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap."
> Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so" in the story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy. The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation", formulated as such in his book review column for Venture in 1957. However, almost all modern uses of the term Sturgeon's law refer to the second, including the definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
"Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so" in the story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy. The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation","
Not to mention, it's not a scientific law, but just an adage. Even then, when there's a higher barrier to entry the law is thought not to apply (such as technical skills required to create professional software).
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.
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 better off going elsewhere with more modern employment law for skilled, high demand workers. Don’t remind me of the monthly paperwork we have to send the government to assure them the French employee isn’t working too much and is taking vacation. An absolute joke.
The French government doesn’t make French engineers very attractive unfortunately.
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.
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.
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.
No in-house expertise means no management responsibility for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly competent engineers, like my wife.
Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue? This is the present and inevitable future.
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.
Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in the world has found a better solution to this.
There is a problem with competing with big players for more than a few years because they figure out ways to push you out of the market before you can beat them, with only a few exceptions.
That is the problem with the environment which needs to be solved.
As a matter of fact I've carved out a niche in these matters over the years. Essentially reverse engineering systems and building out functionality instead of the original creators of the software.
EDIT: The ERP company never made it not possible to interface through their DB in their contracts or by encrypting their functionality in the DB.
The amount of value I bring to my company is greater than 100 fold of my salary.
However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".
That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they are in a better bargaining position and so they can capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create instead of less than 1%.
It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours.
I don't think that this is the case as the value they add comes with opinion entrenched in the belief of the path that their product should take. This opinion actually has caused them to flat out refuse to do some work which in my opinion is an opportunity to make things better for the company that has originally taken on this ERP system as their central authority of information. I actually came in from a friend of mine who knew that I was familiar with Coldfusion. Ultimately in my exploration for knowledge I have become intimately entrapped by the ERP data model based on the simple fact that it is esoteric and inflexible which has in fact been proven by how the front-end interface is a kludge of C++ utilities, C#, and some shell scripts. Upgrades continue to happen but they give me 0 faith that the small company that they are (ERP) has a clear path to less of a kludge of a system. It gives me solace that as long as their opinions are strong contrary to the revenue model of my employer that in fact I will be useful for a long time. The moment the ERP company actually understands the niche they are pursuing is the moment I will have less of a potential for work. Until then they can fight their way upstream against their customers as much as they like and their customers will hedge their bets until they can migrate to something better. It is assumed I am less in line with the directive of the customer and have my own agenda against the ERP company when in fact I am elongating the runway for my company to operate until they have a better plan to migrate away to a solution that doesn't assume so much about their customers. Manufacturing knows they have to evolve yet they have made past decisions that they realize they can only mitigate by extending their systems without having to pay the high prices their vendors request. How is this not a good strategy? It's not like I am a contractor and trust me when I say that my company is better off with my SPOF than just the SPOF of their ERP company. Lose the ERP company and you not only lose the company and their regular updates but you lose the custom development of that company which will be 10 times more when the developers that were fired become independent contractors themselves.
It's just business.
What were the consequences for them of flat out refusing to do that work? What would the consequences be for you if you were to flat out refuse to do something similar? If they would be worse for you, as I suspect, that means their bargaining position is better than yours.
What does your management believe the consequences for them (the management) would be if the ERP company stopped working for them entirely, for example because they got out of the ERP market? What does your management believe the consequences for them would be if you quit? If they would be worse in the first case, as I suspect, that means their bargaining position is better than yours.
This is only loosely connected with how much value each of you actually contributes, which is what matters most in a moral sense. Unfortunately, how that value is distributed among stakeholders usually has more to do with how negotiations go than with how the value is created. Indeed, it's common for negotiations to happen in cases where the net value produced is actually negative, as in lawsuit settlement negotiations, and the question is not so much how to split the winnings as how to split the losses.
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....
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.
Ask them 2-3 LC easies/mediums in the language of their choice for them to prove they can actually write code, and that's really all you need. Unfortunately it somehow became "let's have a 5 hour long two-part panel interview where we ask you half a dozen LC hards and oh yeah don't google anything" as a way to hire experienced people who have a decade of work they can talk about the discuss ad nauseum.
I see it as a great way to just run a sanity check that this person who graduated from Random State six months ago can actually code, and as a great way to ensure high quality very senior people refuse to go through your interview (unless you're paying FAANG wages).
This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
If you're still breathing and have more than 2-3 years of dev experience you should at least be contacted.
I work for a company nobody here has heard of, working on a boring tech stack. Absolutely nothing I do day to day would make into any blog post, let alone anything on HN. I, and my ~dozen or so coworkers, get at least one cold recruiter contact a week. Obviously most of them are garbage. But we've all gotten the random contact from an Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook recruiter. The interviews are available.
YC runs workatastartup.com - I submitted my resume and a two-sentence intro to 5 or 6 companies and I think I got an interview at all but one. The interview is the easy part, and if you can't even get that with a decade of programming experience, you're getting caught in some arbitrary filter. Which is to say, respectfully, you're doing something wrong because that's simply not what the market is right now. Or, you're not quite as qualified as you think you are.
But I have a relevant PhD, demonstrable industry experience leading a recognisable project, many papers, lots of experience developing juniors, influential keynotes, blog posts, etc.
If you used LeetCode you wouldn't hire me. I don't know if you think that's a loss or not? But it's a data point.
But I will say in my experience a PhD is a red flag for a developer, especially if you're highlighting your academic experience on your resume. It's just that the skills that make you successful in getting a PhD don't necessarily translate to day-to-day software development and in some cases will hinder you/the team.
There goal is to get as much student loan money that they can, they do not seem to care about the quality of education the students are getting
This goes for all levels of universities, and all degree programs.
It's the same human impulse that drives people to bind their feet, value bleached skin, engage in conspicuous consumption, etc. It's all an elaborate signal game designed to convince people of your social status.
The problem is that we looked at that system and instead of trying to build something better we dumped more money into it in the form of student loans and expected that now more people will be given access to those class signifiers and thereby raise their social status and standard of living. In actual practice, of course, what we did was raise the bar on what qualifies as a class signifier, forcing a generation into wage slavery with little real benefit to them or to society as a whole (other than those institutions who siphon off those extra dollars and use them to metastasize extra layers of administration and management to little effect)
What we need is for education to be more job skills training and less social positioning. Funding for adult education should be linked to the success rate of students leaving those programs. If you have the money to burn studying topics that will indicate to your peers how little you need the money, then great. That's apparently the way we've decided to structure things. For the rest of us though let's try to encourage study of topics that will help society work better instead of vainly trying to convince the rich kids club to let us in.
And companies stereotype all graduates as worth nothing to them.
I had a couple simple Android apps when I graduated. Even though they were simple, it would show that I could follow best practices, code, test, and deliver something. I had a decent GPA (3.5), clubs, etc. I still had a hard time finding companies that would even give me an interview.
So sure, a degree doesn't mean too much (my masters has done nothing for me). But it seems companies have simply given up and are exacerbating the very problem they are creating.
I don't waste my time on LC now. If I get free time, I'd rather work on a personal project or hobby.
Granted, I'm actually thinking of moving into some sort of corporate strategy analyst role since I don't really get to code anymore. The past 2 years has been very little coding or business problem solving. It's mostly been config, infrastructure, prod support, and meetings/paperwork. I'm tired of it. I want to solve problems and build substantial things. I assume I'm rusty when it comes to coding now.
I'm not talking about trick "do you remember A* search" questions. I'm talking about the ability to write a basic program and to reason about what it will do.
I've seen this across the gamut, from new grads to staff engineers.
Part of this is selection bias: those folks probably apply to many companies before they slip through somewhere, so they're overrepresented as interviewees.
My sense is that it's becoming more common. Undergrad CS has ever more people who are in it for reasons unrelated to enjoyment or curiosity.
That said there are people who really can't code, from my experience working with such folks.
It makes sense when looking at the numbers. No use in putting money into U.S. education if they don't have to. The law allows them to import workers from elsewhere, parasiting off of their social educational programs and never having to pay a dime to them.
The solution is clear, we have to make it more economically viable to invest in the U.S, and that is by removing or severely limiting the mechanisms by which tech companies employ foreign workers. Or alternatively we start actually taxing these companies.
Have they ever been?
This is the exact concept of an IQ test. They aren't labor intensive.
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).
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.
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.
But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
These people must be working for terrible companies. Come and work for Shopify! We even partner with a university to offer year-round internships while you study for your degree. I regularly mentor juniors to build them up to research-level engineers.
yeah, they really are. no one said anything about terrible companies, smh.
The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.
In December, I applied to a number of blue chip companies for frontend positions and only got callbacks to three of them despite a lot of work experience writing JS for real applications including a YC company. Some YC companies also said to me they wanted someone more experienced in Vue/React instead of potentially allowing me time and space to ramp up my knowledge of it. So clearly there were other applicants who had both a lot of work experience AND the precise tech knowledge they needed, so they didn't have to take a risk on someone who didn't perfectly fit the position.
I eventually landed a dream position, but a huge reason why they looked at my application in the first place was because I knew of a long time employee. Obviously I had to pass the technical and behavior interviews, but they had a deluge of applicants and my application would've been lost to the ether had it not been for that connection.
These companies are meant to be heavily taxed for how much they are taking from society, with those taxes put back into education. Yet here we are.
I am currently applying for an entry-level position at a FAANG company. I had "in-person" remote interviews a few weeks ago. I was told that I passed, and I should expect some "team fit" interviews the following week.
Except over the intervening weeks, I've had zero team fit interviews, because - as far as I can tell - the recruiter handling me hasn't been able to persuade even a single manager to agree to an interview. This is not a situation that screams "we are experiencing a worker shortage, and we will even lower ourselves to hire inexperienced workers that we have to train". It would tend to suggest that the company is swimming in far more applicants than it wants for every role.
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?
No, there's not. There's a shortage of cheap experienced software engineers in the US.
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
Off-the-shelf packages didn't work right because they couldn't be tailored to the existing workflow, and couldn't be integrated into other systems. Three attempts at offshoring all failed because of culture and communication differences.
In the end, it was done in-house. It took longer, but the application is exactly what was required, and new features can be added in days or weeks, not months or quarters. Last I heard, almost everyone was happy with the home-grown solution.
CRUD can be simple. But CRUD can also be hard. Anyone who thinks that they can spin up a generic CRUD and solve any problem is someone who doesn't really understand what the problem is.
I’d say anything core to a business in terms of how it functions is not ripe for outsourcing, and anyone doing this is going to feel a lot of pain
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
There are a ton of software engineers who are grinding away on ERP software are capable of handling the vast majority of work at most SV companies. Many of them can't pass leetcode style interviews despite being capable of doing the actual work. Some of them could but don't think they could. But that leaves plenty of engineers who just don't think the prep time is worth it. Those are the people who you could convince by increasing wages.z
I've worked with many smart software engineers in specialties outside of backend web development/distributed systems who are capable of retraining in a matter of months and would retrain if the pay differential were high enough.
Of course the other option is for companies to come up with more realistic hiring tests, lower the bar and fire quickly, or train employees and set a realistic retention budget.
These days, people with this skillset are commonly employed to design data infrastructure software for cases where open source software has material deficiencies in terms of scalability, performance, or efficiency. Optimization of complex AI/ML processes is another emerging area where I see friends being hired. It typically isn't a leetcode style hiring process.
A software engineer cannot be retrained to do this role in months, the domain is too deep. It requires multiple years of diligent self-study to achieve functional competency, plus many more years for mastery, and I've never seen an exception to this. Much of the essential theory is diverse and never covered in undergrad e.g. greedy routing theory, universal sequence prediction problems, agreement-free consistency, etc. Efficient reduction to practice on real hardware is esoteric, non-obvious, and poorly documented. You need similar levels of low-level knowledge about how silicon behaves as software optimization specialists. In most cases, all existing software is demonstrably unfit for purpose which often implies a likely requirement for inventing a novel and/or unorthodox software design that is superior to what has been done before (the alternative is that all popular implementations that might be fit for purpose are just really poor, in which case you do a blank-sheet implementation of a conventional design).
Consequently, the new talent pipeline is almost entirely sourced from people who devote years of their life to mastery solely because they love the problem space. We simply have no practical way to produce this skillset at a rate sufficient to meet demand. In principle you could build a full-time educational program that focused on training people up effectively but it would still require years to produce more talent like this.
I’d be very interested to hear more. Do you have a blog, or can you point me to any relevantly communities?
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.
In the medium term, you'll start attracting doctors from related fields who are willing to retrain.
And in the long term, paying more will attract more candidates graduating from med school who will be performing useful work in 5 years or so.
In software engineering, attracting engineers from other less profitable industries wouldn't take nearly as long.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...).
If you've ever interacted with a recruiting pipeline at a big company you know the recruiters spend way more effort trying to recruit the few "diverse" people than everyone else. There's not much talent you're missing out on. If 80% of CS grads at universities are male then your pipeline is 80% male. There's no 30% extra women that are somehow recruitable but missed by every firm out there. Those women don't exist, else they would have been hired already.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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