‘Nearshoring’ Push Is Fueling Tech Job Demand in Latin America | Hacker News Reader

‘Nearshoring’ Push Is Fueling Tech Job Demand in Latin America

bloomberg.com

104 pointsmfiguiere149 comments

This will get big pretty soon. It's been a trend for a while, my last few jobs we've had LATAM contractors. No time zone issues like with overseas and much less of a language and cultural barrier, like basically nonexistent compared to India. Average skill of LATAM devs is still low compared to the US, but they will learn and grow as more work moves there.

> Average skill of LATAM devs is still low compared to the US

I'd say it is a sample bias of the developers working as contractors (average devs with good enough English).

Top LATAM talent moves abroad or works as employees at international companies that pay way more than nearshores.

I worked with great LATAM talent, but they weren't contractors, they were at Auth0 (founded by an Argentinian, incidentally).

There is a lot of top Latam talent who want to stay in Latam because of family and culture issues, and also because earning in US$ while working remote from Latin America can provide a much higher quality of life than you would be able to get in the US.

Yes, that's actually my case. But, getting a salary on par with your skill set may require you to work directly with the employer or a lot of negotiation.

I've seen cases of top developers earning almost 50% less than their peers because they were hired via subcontractors.

i consider myself a good developer. when i was working as contractor for us companies, my fees were on par with my US colleagues (low six digits USD).

but it was not worth it for me to keep doing it, so i moved to europe (which was also quite easy given my resume).

Can you please provide more detail on why?

I would’ve figured it would be an amazing situation being in lcol earning a lot

Agreed. The skill isn't even an issue - you just hire them for the right roles.

Having the same definition of "no" as Americans is huge. Indians have a really tough time saying something isn't going well, or that we shouldn't do a project, for cultural reasons. That's great! Culture is great.

For work though, something closer to the culture of the outsourcer makes it a lot easier to deal with.

Flights are also so much easier, everyone I know speaks at least SOME Spanish (unlike Hindi/Tamil/Tagalog for the other big destinations) and that helps rough out the edges a LOT.

I'd bet on Mexico, hard, right now. Same with BA and Colombia.

100%! I've worked with a ton of great Indian folks, but the "no" cultural translation is hard.

Just yesterday I was working through an issue, came up with a clear plan that critically involved notifying the customer before making any changes, after they'd been burned by previous uncommunicated changes.

Was in the middle of a busy day, so I didn't think and quickly asked if there were any problems or everyone was onboard with the plan: "Yes."

5 minutes later, as I'm typing an email to the customer, I get pinged: "The changes have been implemented. Kindly confirm with the customer they took effect as desired."

FML. My fault... but really hard to keep yes/no mapping in my head constantly, at all times.

I don't understand what your alternative was? How was this your fault?

If you're aware of the situation you can change the questions you ask and how you probe in to account for the difference in "no" in order to get to the truth.

I believe they're saying that due to them being busy they didn't think about it at the time even though they should've known better.

Having had similar things happen before, the optimal move on my part would have been to language-engineer a better confirmation question and/or ask for read-back of the plan.

E.g. open-ended, no direct requirement to reply in a negative manner, etc.

I don't really get this anecdote, this seems less like someone having a different definition of "no" and more like just ignoring you (which happens all the time, it's hard to listen to everything in a workplace slack)

I'm surprised Slack doesn't have a functionality where you can tag something like a sentence or a phrase as "essential" and make everybody else tap a button acknowledging that they've read and understood it. Maybe also with a timer that stops you from tapping it before you can read it.

Ah, but as soon as everything is tagged as "essential", nothing is. :/

The true engineering fields have a praxis of using actual signatures on designs, documentation, and decisions for exactly this reason: people are more likely to take meaningful responsibility for understanding the subject matter when their signature is permanently engraved on the decision (and there is in fact more meaningful responsibility when you can trace signatures).

Could you explain more what you mean with Americans & Indians having different definitions of "no"?

In Indian culture, it is considered rude to say "No", so you will never get a direct No from them. "Can you do this?" - "Yes, I'll do my best" most likely means that you won't get what you asked for.

Correct -"I'll do my best" is "No." "I can do it/I will do the needful" is an _actual_ "yes"

Mexico is going to need to change their labor laws if they want a big piece of this pie.

I’ve had a nearshore team in Mexico for four years the people are great for all the reasons mentioned.

The gap, however is costs. We’re used to “at-will” employment in the states are used to a “Hire slow, fire fast” paradigm. In MX the cost to fire a full time employee is 3 months severance (regardless of seniority) plus 20 days for each year worked (labor calculations in MX are done in day rates), plus all accrued vacation and pro-rated Christmas bonus (a requisite MX bonus). Firing someone with 3-4 years tenure can cost 3-6 months of salary.

The labor “board” in MX is not a neutral arbiter. They represent the employee in the case of a labor claim.

You can skirt this a bit with contractors but that only works for a limited time (contract to hire is common and advisable)

Mexico has been a pain point for me. I’ve done everything aboveboard and legally but after having been down the rabbit hole a bit I feel there’s a lot of gray between what’s legal and what’s done in practice and I didn’t have anyone who could help me navigate those waters.

There’s big shops opening up in Guadalajara and some other areas and larger companies can weather these issues better then I could with a small team of about 10. But if you’re a smaller startup or services provider I’d be very wary of getting in too deep in Mexico at this point.

The one big loophole is to basically hire an agency in MX and pay a premium for devs but don’t take on any of the labor risk.

The hire-slow, fire-fast paradigm might be an employers dream, but it is _terrible_ for employees. In the worst-case situation you end up quitting your job and maybe even moving to be let go with little warning? That's rough. I think if the employer wants to fire someone, they _should_ be paying for severance.

For good workers it is better, as it is easier to get hired and you won't have to pick up a bunch of slack for useless colleagues who are impossible to fire. And if you are fired it's easy to find a new job. Hard firing is only good for employees who don't deliver.

Stronger protections help good workers too, such that it eliminates some risk in changing jobs, for example, to take on new opportunities that may be really exciting. It also adds some nominal value to tenure at a job (IE, there is a known ahead of time amount of severance you can expect if things do go sideways for reasons beyond your control, like in a merger)

The assertion that it only helps employees who don't deliver is not accounting for any variance factors that may not be obvious immediately.

Stronger protections hurt better workers, likely more then it helps. It means companies are more apt to keep marginal workers and expect the higher performers to make up the difference

I'd need to see data to really believe this is the norm rather than an outlier

I hope you understand that it is not possible to make such data? You have to use common sense to determine if the assertion is valid or not.

Been great for me as an employee. People are willing to take risks if they know they can fire you if it doesn't work out. That risk has been my carrier, as someone without a traditional background.

It hadn't occurred to me that some people were hiring nearshore employees directly. I thought it was all contractors, in part to smooth out the regulatory differences

That comes at about a 25% premium over salaried employees. For shorter term work and trying out a market it makes sense but if you want to build a long term presence salaried employees with excess cash for severance is more economical.

Hope for Mexico they dont follow the unhumane worker rights of the states. Basically europe has the same principles as in Mexico and people in Europe have good lifes.

Yeah, TIL Mexico is so pro-Labor.

It's disgusting to see "we have to pay 6 months severance to chuck out someone who spent half a decade of their lives with us!" said unironically, even on this board.

Let me clarify the point. I don’t have an issue with the severance for staff I’ve had to let go for as layoffs due to economic conditions of the company. I’ve made those severance payments without issue.

My issue is more with letting go of people for performance reasons. Hiring someone for 2 months and finding out they are under performing still requires the severance pay. You can fight this with the labor board but the standard is high when letting go because of performance.

It’s a paradigm shift for most US based companies where letting someone go for performance reasons can come at a low cost.

It also means, in the context of this thread, that Mexico is at a competitive disadvantage to other south and Central American countries with more lax labor laws.

From the point of view of the worker, it's the same thing -- you were employed with the expectation of stability, now you're getting fired and have to find another job before your family ends up on the street. It's a very vulnerable position to be as a worker, which is why in many countries they have the right to severance pay.

Anyway, it's common (here in Uruguay at least) for contracts to include a 3 month "test period" clause where the company can fire you without paying severance, to prepare for that exact situation. Don't you do that? It's reasonable enough to me.

So, when you decide to leave a company where you have spent half a decade, do you provide 6 months free labor, or do you do the disgusting thing and just leave?

A worker leaving is not even remotely as impactful to a company as a worker being let go is to the worker and their family. It's absurd to even imply it's the case.

Is it really due to proportions?

In that case say you leave a startup of 3 people. Not the same as company firing one guy, but roughly 1/3rd impact, so 2 months of free severance labor is on you, correct, to avoid being "disgusting"?

Or if you happen to be a particularly valuable, hard-to-replace specialist; or happen to have unique knowledge of some legacy systems that nobody else can maintain, your impact can be order-of-magnitude comparable to being fired (in fact, the impact of you being fired might be lower for you than the impact of you leaving is for the company because you might find the next job very easily) and you would owe /some/ free labor, right? Exact proportions TBD.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a ton of severance if I was laid off. But I don't suffer for excusitis and don't contort morality into some ridiculous fairness arguments. I am just selfish and I like money, so hey, I wouldn't mind some.

It’s a trade off: countries that are hard to fire are also hard to hire. So your life is great in Europe once you secured employment, but employers are extra careful and very conservative in hiring.

Didn't the grandparent poster literally say "hire slow, fire fast"?

I think most European countries still allow for probationary periods; if I recall correctly they can stretch into years in some cases.

Surely 6 months is enough to figure out whether or not someone will be a dud. Maybe you won’t know their full potential at that point but you should have a good idea of whether or not they meet minimum standards.

Many also allow for casual or part-time gigs with less protections, which ends up with tons of almost-full-time workers putting in the time to prove they're worthy of being bumped to full-time.

Not much different to the contracting world in IT, really.

I read this differently.

Seems like Mexico isn't open to wanting their workers to be exploited en masse, so they have protections and laws, much akin to Europe for instance, that favor employees in some circumstances, or at least gives them a fair process (the labor board)

This comment really doesn't come off well to me that your basic complaint is that Mexico has laws that don't weight entirely toward the employer, basically

Is that a loophole? That's what I would expect most people to want to do anyway.

Why not just hire the employees are contractors instead?

The contractor vs fill-time employee line is pretty hazy in most countries. Mexico has actually closed that loophole.

IIRC after six months of contracting an employee is considered full time regardless of the mechanism of hiring.

> The one big loophole is to basically hire an agency in MX and pay a premium for devs but don’t take on any of the labor risk.

Less labor risk also means you miss out on the upside, though. If you end up with someone really good, they could be rotated to another client at any time and you don’t have many levers you can pull to retain them.

That's why Colombia is worth checking out. They're much more balanced between capital and labor. Google has a big office in Bogota for a reason.

I actually like Mexico's labor laws. I particularly like their stance on hiring illegal labor, which is IIRC one of, if not the, biggest economic crimes one can commit in the country. It amounts to economic treason, because unlike the US, Mexico realizes that an economy doesn't exist in a bubble, and that communities and economies are intertwined. If you avoid hiring your neighbor to hire some illegal immigrant so you can save a few pesos, don't be surprised if your neighbor turns to desperate measures in order to have enough money to feed their family.

More developed countries could, and should, learn a thing or two from that.

You may need to pay a few months of salary, but how much is that really compared to paying someone working in the US? A normal severance package for someone in the US who has worked for 3-4 years at a company will be 1-2 months of salary, which is probably more than 6 months worth of Mexican salary. And that's to say nothing of all the money you saved over those 3-4 years. Seems like a small cost of doing business.

> Firing someone with 3-4 years tenure can cost 3-6 months of salary.

You seem to be saying this like it's a bad thing?

It is the USA that really needs to change labor laws to be more humane. Sounds like Mexico is doing well.

We hire across LATAM. Mexico still lags behind Argentina and Uruguay in terms of skill level. Lots of low skill, boot-camp style grads. Few true engineers.

Colombia is catching up but ARG and URU still reign supreme.

My colleagues in Argentina (many of them are from elsewhere in latam and migrated to ARG) are from what I can tell equally skilled to my US-located peers. Maybe there's more noise to signal in the region, but the talent is there and available.

Yeah, I don't think we've had a bad hire yet from ARG. Most of our devs are absolutely world-class, but at a fraction of the cost of comparable US employees. And we pay them very well for the region; several have built homes not just for themselves but for family members since they started working with us.

Are there any pertinent distinctions between Mexico and Columbia?

Colombia

don't worry I made that mistake and one engineer was trying to get my address to send me "the shirt"

Colombia is cheaper, arguably better run, significantly safer, and (to the extent that it matters) speaks Spanish similar to "the King's English" instead of something more dialectal.

Big fan of Colombia. They're in the middle of a real boom.

Arguably the big one is the NAFTA TN Visa, which makes it easy to get Mexican help into the US. No H1B needed.

Lotta business, esp. manufacturing, in Mexico as well; they've recently overtaken China and Canada as the US' number one trading partner.

Unfortunately I don't feel like south America has the legal system and lack of corruption to really take off.

No one starts with a perfect government. China still doesn't have a real legal system, and it's definitely taken off.

> Indians have a really tough time saying something isn't going well, or that we shouldn't do a project, for cultural reasons. That's great! Culture is great. For work though, something closer to the culture of the outsourcer makes it a lot easier to deal with.

It sounds like it’s not great. Indians are apparently losing business over it. And I suspect they’d be more efficient if they changed that aspect of their culture, at least for business.

I’m Bangladeshi and have the same inclination about bad news and saying “no.”[1] I’ve materially improved my career by channeling my west coast American wife in bluntly addressing bad news early, and saying “no” when something isn’t doable. (I still do the Indian “no” with my parents and it drives my wife nuts. “Why did you tell your mom you’d do that when you know you aren’t going to do that?”)

[1] I think it’s a characteristic of hierarchical, face-saving cultures in general, including the American south.

At a previous company we had some contractors from Brazil and I was really quite impressed. Super knowledgeable and it was great not having a huge language barrier.

At my current company we started doing hiring in Brazil, and a few in Colombia. In both cases they are in general pretty exceptional devs. I have spent a lot of time in Colombia myself and there is a boom in entrepreneurship and tech in my opinion there (and not just among expats since there are plenty there). I can only assume the same of places like Brazil as well.

My last job we also worked with devs from Mexico, and same thing. I have worked with some great Indian colleagues but I would say in general I work a lot easier with devs from Latin America compared to overseas. Though I am a bit biased since I speak Spanish myself at a C1 level. Rarely do I really need to flip to Spanish for anything but it helps to be able to bridge the cultural gap.

It's pretty big now. Uruguay's entire tech labor pool has been consumed by nearshoring agencies. Competition in Argentina and Colombia is catching up.

Disagree on skill level. The average US dev is pretty bad. Most of us on HN just have the privilege of working at 1% companies with 1% developers. Those same people exist in LATAM, they're just 1% of the population there too!

Yes yes yes. This also is why devs in places like India working at body shops like TCS aren't great - MS etc have sucked up all the best talent.

Worked with the Office team in ... Bengaluru? Fantastic engineers.

Same. Been seeing a lot of stuff operating out of Mexico City, and to a lesser extent, Greater Baja California for West Coast timezones. Did several projects with Mexican PMs but Chilean or Uruguayan support, esp. out of the Zona America in Uruguay.

On top of all of the reasons mentioned, Mexico is also attractive due to the NAFTA TN Visa, which makes it fairly easy to bring a resource across the border. Basically just need a valid job offer, enough experience and qualifications to check the box, and a fairly trivial application fee. No H1B nonsense, and quick turnaround.

I'd also disagree with the low skill of LATAM devs, I found they were generally pretty good compared to India or PI. If we had an SAP expert in MX we could feel pretty confident they'd know their stuff, while Tata or Cognizant would scrounge up anyone who could spell SAP and try to convince us they were qualified.

This has been happening for quite a while now, I'm in Brazil and most of my career (11 out of 17 years) was built working for companies in the US and eventually Europe. I know many that followed the same path.

One thing that I'm surprised is not happening more, and I'd love to hear your comments about the reasons, is the move of senior engineers from places with high cost of living to countries with much lower cost of living, specially for those that are already remote. Another person commented of such move but considering how much more disposable income one would have I'm very surprised this isn't happening much more often.

I certainly understand how complicated such a change is, specially if you have spouse and children, but the difference in purchasing power and cost of living is so dramatic that a senior eng making 120k USD per year could easily afford a nice house (mortgage), a decent(bilingual/international) education for the children, healthcare for the family (private that wouldn't bankrupt you) and would still have a considerable amount of disposable income for whatever else they think is relevant (I'm using south of Brazil, where I live, as a reference for that).

If you are in such position, have you considered it? If so, what is stopping you right now?

You can have the same with that income in the USA assuming you don't live in Seattle or SF. You can live in Indiana or Texas. Brazil doesn't exactly have a great reputation.

Neither does Texas

Louisiana is more fun

My wife's family is from Louisiana. I love visiting, the people are very warm and the food is great. But after 3 days I want to go back to Atlanta. Louisiana is a terrible place to live, unfortunately.

I find it not so bad compared to other places - Portland for example.

i can tell you that if you have a high enough salary, living in a big city like São Paulo can be as good (if not better) than living in a median US city like Seattle/SF -- specially given conversion rates of USDBRL and housing prices.

If you come from a decent Latam metropolis like Buenos Aires or Santiago and make use of the urban facilities (ie you like going out, being close to universities and airports and various activities), anything beyond top-tier US cities is a real step down in quality of life.

dfw has world class restaurants and one of the best airports. and a highly diverse housing stock. you can get a new house at 400k or you can live in a mansion or high rise condo or anywhere in between. recreation is the major downside and the heat but that’s what the airports are for. world class private and public schools, major universities, etc

you can also get a mortgage. good luck in buenos aires!

But driving and having to take flights for entertainment are precisely what people hate about American urbanism and one of the bigger reasons why people move back.

I'm a senior engineer and I moved to Latam (on my own, not for work). Unless you are prepared to give up a lot I don't see why anyone would consider this.

What's the incentive? Unless you are looking for an adventure there is no reason to give up your stable standard of living. Also take into consideration that all of Latam, even Mexico and Chile which are the most developed countries are much more dangerous. Education of your kids is worse. Pollution is worse. Political stability isn't guaranteed. Healthcare isn't the best.

I'm also not too sure about the cost of living argument. I'm originally from Europe where both rent and food are more affordable than here (talking about supermarkets, not restaurants where staff is underpaid).

What about Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay? Seems like a broad brush to paint an entire continent and a half.

I stayed in London for three years, then moved back to Italy because with the pandemic I had gone to the office only twice in 18 months, and because my wife and daughter didn't like London a lot; I was able to keep my job as a hands on team leader (Rails+React) with the same company I was working for.

Now I'm looking for a new job, from Italy, and I'm finding that it's much more difficult to do that when you're already remote, compared to when I was in London. Lots of roles I could have applied before specify "fully remote from the UK". So, it's not so obvious that, if you move, you have as many opportunities.

PS if anybody is interested in hiring me, contacts are in my profile :)

Is that a Brexit thing?

Know there's been a lot of shuffle in regulations on the UK side, along with some as-yet-to-be-defined regulations, so I'd hazard it's UK companies hedging their risk by saying "We just don't want to deal with global-remote until we get regulatory clarity."

I'm not sure; that could be a reason for this. I've got a personal company so I can be paid B2B, which is very simple, but probably this could create some uncertainty and doubt, and could be a good reason not to take risks.

My social circle's experience is that it's easier and more convenient to find a remote position in a company based in Ireland.

Also tech salaries are higher because Ireland is a country with effectively two, very different economies and wages in the UK outside of London are surprisingly low.

Thank you for the suggestion, will take a look!

I live in North America and I have no desire to move back to Brazil. I've toyed with the idea of going there once a year and spend 3 months working remotely but the reality is that, at least in my hometown, the quality of life is much worse except for food. I have a really good time in the first few weeks but then issues like pollution, traffic and general culture of Brazilians starts to get me by week 4. Maybe Brazil's south is different, I've heard good things.

Cost of living where I a, in NA is def higher but I also know that my kids will get a better education overall. In fact, you have to pay a fortune in tuition fees for your kids to have a similar education to public schools here in NA.

I am not sure what is your situation but if you have more than 1 child, things start to get dicey cost-wise. I don't think there is a lot of disposable income to go around, and that's for a relative low cost of living city in Brazil like Recife. I guess if you are childless things would be different and I can see the fun times outweighing the rest. But for me it is a solid "no way".

I feel the same way, after 1.5 yrs in Mexico.

Too much:

- Noise

- Lawless culture & government corruption

- Pollution & its related "who cares" culture around trash & toxic chemicals

To little:

- Infrastructure

- Education

- Respect for nature & concern for reducing the impact of pollution

- Enforcement of health & environmental regulation

That said, there are ardent environmentalists & industrious, educated people. They're just at a low concentration due to the human development itself-- it takes time for societies to develop to high levels of living standards and human achievement.

On one hand, senior people who moved overseas have already established their life in the EU or US, have a family and children, etc.

Also, people who move away generally do so for reasons beyond money. Like you say, even a mid-senior role pays very well for Latam, but people end up moving for things like safety (most Latam cities are generally much less safe), education (quality education is difficult to come by in many countries), or career advancement (unfortunately most companies won't accept executive roles in Latam, or will do so at Latam salaries which are actually a step down).

In my personal experience, with a third of my friends having moved overseas, career advancement and getting away from difficult situations make up most of the reasons for not coming back. Friends who've experienced traumatic robberies or violent situations or who come from broken families generally want to get away from that and career advancement and money just end up being the excuse.

>If you are in such position, have you considered it?

Yes. I actually broke into software development while living in Mexico.

Prior to that, in a tent. I realized the cost of living would be cheaper in Mexico while I worked on a full stack app (the app's ultimate purpose was simply to demo my skill during interviews). Once the app was almost done, I moved back to the US, and a couple months later landed my first 100% programming job.

>If so, what is stopping you right now?

I've spent 1.5 years now, living in Mexico-- Playa Rosarito, Bucerias, Tepic, CDMX, Tulum.

I am strongly considering moving back to the Bucerias area to explore more of the West Coast-- Mazatlan to Huatulco, for example, by scooter, since I was recently laid off.

I'm on the fence about committing to Mexico or any of Latin America for the rest of my life.

Mainly due to:

- Inconveniences: Not having drinking water available in houses-- every few days, I'd estimate 90% of people in Mexico take water jugs to fill up at a public tap-- Much as you'd see in a textbook documentary about a refugee village in rural Africa. Though perhaps with a good filtration system it's possible to purify water at home.

- The culture around Noise: People advertise in the street by shouting or playing annoying loud announcements from loudspeakers

- The culture around Pollution: using chemicals without protection or with disregard about potential impact on human health. Examples: airbnb host using pesticide (RAID brand) indoors. construction worker friends applying pesticide outside without any protective gear and without warning anyone to close their windows for 15-30 mins to avoid inhaling the airborne pesticide mist. Plus lack of waste system infrastructure means you find a lot of trash in the urban and even rural environment (people dump trash into holes in the ground along rural roads, for example, due to no landfills or trash-pickup service existing in many areas).

- Low interest in education & industriousness (though I am sure this is changing). Especially if compared to the culture around achievement in South Asia & East Asia. It makes it a bit challenging to make friends with people at similar education & career attainment levels that I'd have if I stayed in the US.

- Crime & lack of justice: the vast majority of crime goes unpunished. Vigilante justice happens. There's a general sense of lawlessness, especially when police officers & judges can be bribed.

That said, I'm still on the fence.

I prefer a society which is quiet, industrious, conscientious and well educated.

Mexico isn't quite there yet, but hopefully it'll be significantly closer to the US levels of those things in the next 2-5 decades.

It does offer: A friendly culture. Great food. Adventures.

I wonder if a big reason is that it is very uncomfortable to move somewhere where you will be in the 1% elite of the local area. My kids would be singled out, our friends/peers would be few and far between. There would probably be few activities for the kid, and so on. This is what a high CoL area gets you.

My goal is to transition to Costa Rica the closer I get to retirement. I would still love to work there as well, but I'm dreaming of a part-time consultancy I can run from my beach house off of one the coasts.

Dealing with bureaucracy the biggest one for me. I'd love to move abroad, but almost all countries have limited tourist stays of 90 days. I don't want to be moving around every 3 months.

For anyone who has worked with a tech company based in Florida, this has been the norm for 15 years. It started with Buenos Aires/Argentina based devs in early 2000s and then clusters started popping up in Bogota, Mexico City, Santiago, and now in 2nd tier Latam cities too. In mid 2000s there was a big push in universities across LatAm to teach OSS tools. One of my friends had a team of 250 engineers in Guatemala like 10 years ago.

There was a brief period 6-7 years ago when Venezuela was in between dictators that they had hints of a blossoming nearshoring industry. Eventually situation got too dangerous and all those that could left to other countries.

So these teams can be built, and this is not new.

I'm in South Florida. All big companies here have a big tech presence in LatAm, especially Argentina & Chile. The last company I worked for had maybe 5 developers tops locally, the rest were based in Argentina.

Funny enough my old landlord is not technical at all yet runs a near-shoring dev shop, primarily in Argentina....she charges a pittance in pure USD terms compared with local devs but somehow she's managed to make a very solid living for herself.

I also lived in DF (Mexico City) for a little while, the tech scene there is very strong. IIRC, YC has funded a handful of companies based there - I don't blame them as that city is growing, modernizing quickly, and is a fast, direct flight to any major tech hub in the US. Plus the cost of living is low, and the street food is genuinely incredible. Highly recommend it to anyone who wants to dip their toes into LatAm but doesn't want to fly all the way to Santiago, Sao Paolo or Buenos Aires.

How did she connect her devs with her clients?

That, I do not know - I'd have to ask. I'm guessing she acts as an intermediary/agent of sorts, and probably has 1-2 PMs or lead engineers here in the US, so all external calls are with that group, and then the work is partitioned off from there to the team in Argentina.

When I first recruited devs in latam 18 years ago, I posted job ads in the local newspaper, local job boards, etc. (I had no idea what I was doing tbh). I think today I would reach out to the professors at the local universities, many of whom I've met over the years running their own nearshoring shops as their main source of income vs teaching.

We've bumped into each other. I'm also a Miami dev and part of the 00s brain drain. It's been exciting to see this city change so much. And I've gotten to meet so many amazing developers and engineers.

Probably. I've been down here 7 years now and I used to be pretty active in the local scene in terms of going to meetups, talks, etc.. I am not as active these days but participated in Hack Week.

We probably have a few folks in common. Do you participate in any of the meetups like Brickell Tech Tuesday, the Wynwood Tech slack group, etc..?

On my way to the miami tech happy hour now. I participated at ‘22 and ‘23 Hack Week. I was really impressed by the winners, Yenta.

Neat - I was in the Social House this year during Hack Week. Hack Week is great but it just kind of adds to the whole notion that Miami isn't really a city to grow in, it's a city to come down for a little bit, do something, and leave. Very transient, almost too transient. I was one of 3 people in my house that actually live here, even though the house's roster was close to 40 people. Everyone was from SF/LA.

Is wynwood tech slack group still around? There was a period a few years back when there were like 5 competing slack groups (MIA Tech, Miamitech, RefreshMiami, WynwoodTech, etc). Also Hey Joe!

I used to be much more active in the local scene, but having a kid + covid shifted my focus to other things. But it is wild to see how much it has changed here in 5 years.

I mean, it kind of is (i recognize your name - aren't you one of the guys who started the group?). I joined it as well as Refresh and some others back when I moved here 7 years ago. Now it's just a small amount of people who occasionally post there. It's pretty much dead, though.

The local scene here is, well, sort of dead. CIC is no more, The Lab isn't hosting (m)any community events, Wynwood is now overrun by tourists more than it ever was since I've been here, and the Brickell event seems to be the only thing going (shoutout to Chuck!).

There are crypto-focused events i think but i'm not really into crypto so I wouldn't really know.

Also - side note: I founded an EdTech company here in 2017 and recently closed it. I checked out your latest project, looks super cool - congrats!!!

I didn't start wynwood tech, but did start refreshmiami back in 2006. None of the chat groups that I know of had the density or momentum to thrive. Lots of activity moved to whatsapp and telegram groups during the wave of newcomers during covid. Refresh stopped doing in person events as well, so we only restarted that a few months ago after a 2+ year hiatus (events are super time consuming to do well, and hard to make sense financially).

CIC space is re-launching soon under new management as CIC moved on from this location. I do miss the early days of the LAB when they were the nexus of all the activity. Sadly I haven't set foot in the LAB in over 4 years.

What's sad to me is that most of the newcomers don't really engage with people who have been here for a while.

Happy to hear Refresh has started doing events again.

I miss the intimate events that were under 100 people where you could actually talk to people who were doing something besides crypto. Really miss when LiveNinja's staff would make waffles every week and let locals do presentations about whatever technical or business topics they chose.

Sad to hear that CIC moved on from that space - that location was great for both businesses and events....loved their kitchen space and the game room next door (and the hidden listening room!).

I have only been here since 2016 but I loved the LAB when I first got here (maybe I'm biased because I'm a Wyncode alum and the classes were out of the LAB). So many events, cool companies, interesting people, etc... but that's all in the past now....Wynwood lost the little amount of soul it still had by the time I moved here.

Shit, there's very little community here these days it seems.

I can speak for Mexico. We have so much going for it.

1. A robust manufacturing economy (unlike the rest of LATAM) right on the border with the #1 consumer. 2. A culture that is easy to digest for Americans and Europeans alike. 3. People that are welcoming of foreigners, and used to them thanks to decades of tourism. 4. A relatively educated and increasingly educated population. 5. A very comprehensive free trade agreement with the US. 6. A geopolitical environment that is pushing for "Nearshoring" and "Friendshoring". 7. A visa system that allows foreigners to live up to 4 years without paying local taxes as long as they are emplyed elsewehre. 8. A robust tourism economy. 9. A hard working culture.

In the last 5-10 years, I've seen big changes in the presence of foreigners that are in Mexico to work. Digital nomads in CDMX or in Puerto Escondido, lots of Japanese execs living in Leon, lots of foreigners buying property in small towns, labor scarcity in the border towns leading to high salaries. Really it's Mexico's time to shine.

However, we also happen to have the worst admin to handle these tailwinds. AMLO has been slowly eroding institutions, backing off from free-trade, making dumb investments and canceling obvious infra projects, flirting with the cartels.

For manufacturing, AMLO's energy counter-reforms have made access to power the main bottleneck for setting up shop in Mexico, it's just to hard to get a permit from the power company. Safety has been spiraling out of control in the areas where the cartel's dominate, and instead of pushing for the state's monopoly of violence, he has repeatedly appeased them.

I wonder what a difference it would have made to have had a more competent man sit on the presidential chair during these times.

What is the situation with cartels? I like the idea of Mexico but tbf I'm terrified of even visiting for tourism because of the shooting/kidnapping stories. For example for the '24 eclipse I'm just sticking to Texas

Interested in this too. Hope op replies

Lots of shark attacks too

No, and not even close to the same thing.

Anecdotal, but I am someone who lived in Mexico as a non-citizen on a resident visa for a year or so. I have never had problems with cartels/shootings or anything of the like. But obviously this will highly depend on what activities you partake in, and where you end up visiting.

The worst I have had happen is a case of pickpocketing that happened to my GF. I would obviously not recommend going to areas that are known for issues. I also recommend doing the majority of traveling to other cities via airplane if you are worried about this sort of thing. I did take plenty of busses myself but I know some people are very paranoid/worried of what can happen.

There are 32 US cities, including Huston TX, with a higher homicide rate than Mexico City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

Foreigners getting kidnapped is very uncommon. It happens from time to time, although it makes it to the news and they do try to find the kidnappers.

School shootings are extremely rare.

I don't think that CDMX is considered a hotbed of cartel activity?

It's not, atleast directly. The cartels do participate in politics but that's mainly through bribery and other white-collar illegal activities that mainly concerns politicians.

Same goes for the touristy areas like Cabo and Cancun - the cartels own them all and that's a legitimate source of real, clean income (and dollars) for the cartels, and the last thing they want to do is mess with that. The cartels have a vested interest in keeping the resort towns running as smoothly and crime-free as possible.

Why so many red flags on the State Department website then? Are you saying they're just wrong? https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

There are six states with red flags, the rest are cautionary advisories.

Yeah, but compare that to, for example, our other neighbor Canada: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

Even the State Department warnings are localized to certain areas.

And as a rule, the State Department’s advisories tend to be incredibly conservative. Nobody wants to get hauled in front of Congress because something bad happened to a tourist in an area the State Department said was okay.

People who actually do business in Mexico have access to much more detailed and nuanced security advice.

Around 2006 I travelled around Mexico extensively including drinking heavily and getting on tubes late at night in Mexico City and living in an apartment for a while. Had no problems whatsoever. I was hit by terrorists in Nepal and thieves in Costa Rica which everyone seems to consider safe. Maybe things have changed a lot since then, would be interesting to see the stats.

I'd be way more concerned with gangs as a business person than as a tourist though, but maybe I watched Breaking Bad and Saul too much.

Sounds like you lived life to the fullest

I've talked with people outside the United States that are terrified to send their loved ones here for similar reasons. It's an old media canard to highlight the most extreme aspects of a country and hold them up as typical.

When you visit a foreign country it is best to do your research. For instance, if you visit California and spend your vacation in Stockton or San Bernardino you should take some basic precautions that the natives already do. Some countries are honestly dangerous, but Mexico isn't bad for tourism unless you are actively seeking the more dangerous parts.

The major problems are when you start bringing your business into the country. That is a whole new kettle of fish. At that point you need to work the system to acquire a patronage network or work with established interests.

Much like the USA, violence is restricted geographically. I would not hang out in rural areas near the border. I would absolutely hang out in CDMX or Yucatan.

Yucatan has a lower murder rate than most EU countries.

TLDR: It really depends on where you are. Stick to the tourist and safe cities and states and you will be fine.

CDMX, Yucatan, Oaxaca, and many of the frequently touristed areas are very safe. There has been increasing cartel activity in Riviera Maya (Cancun, Tulum, etc) with shootings between cartel members being more common, but AFAIK it hasn't gotten bad enough for people to feel unsafe.

It's a whole different story in the states of Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Colima, etc. There you have strong cartel presence and constant fighting.

However, even in those states you can probably be safe if you know which areas to stick to. When I visit home (I am from Juarez, Chihuahua), I don't feel unsafe, but I do stick to the "safe" areas. Moreover, in my city, most of the violent crime is just cartel-on-cartel shootings so I don't worry about petty crime or kidnappings or what not (this was not the case back in 2008).

There are states like Guanajuato where you have record numbers of homicides. But within the state you have Guanajuato city and San Miguel de Allende that are famous tourist destinations (beautiful places) and are remarkably safe.

I’ve had two ex-coworkers move to Latin America while working full-time remote. One to Mexico City and one doing digital nomad for a few years in Argentina and Chile.

I don’t work directly with them but see their updates on LinkedIn and they claim, and have sustained GitHub activity at least, that they work exactly the same as when they were in the New York suburbs and Miami suburbs.

I read Eastern Standard Tribe [0] by Cory Doctorow maybe 10 or 20 years ago and have been looking forward to remote work aligned by time zones for quite a while.

[0] https://craphound.com/category/est/

I have worked with (managed) 6 colleagues from Colombia while I working for a multi-national corporation (one of the big 4 advertising firms). In the same company, I also worked with 12+ coworkers from India. I have to say that I found my colleagues in Colombia just as talented and motivated as the ones in India. In fact, because the coworkers from Colombia are direct hires, I have an easier time managing them as opposed to the coworkers in India, who are from a contract firm.

Like others have said here, the timezone difference makes things easier too. I still am in contact with 4 of my ex-coworkers in Colombia because I knew that one day, I might want to have my own business and I would hire them all without hesitation.

How did they direct hire them from Columbia, something like Deel?

Curious how they were vetted

I am a lead on a project that uses a 'nearshore' team to augment a very small team of very senior devs. 20+ years each respectively.

That decision was made above me, but has turned out well. Code quality is good and the pay should cause concern US developers.

This is an enterprise system with an Angular 15 front-end. Just the front-end is complex enough that it requires strong understanding of how to write proper Angular/RxJs reactive code, with a highly dynamic UI, on top of all of the Angular fundamentals.

The code is of quality you would expect from an experienced developer, and done on time.

I look at some of the salaries for similar front-end work in SV/SF and it is so out of line compared to this I don't know what to say. "High cost of living" can be discussed all day, but then companies can just hire someone who isn't in a high cost of living area who can do the same thing. For a lot less.

US software engineering is facing multiple challenges on all fronts. We have a lot of junior developers out of bootcamps who can't find work due to saturation, we have nearshore companies with skilled engineers that cost a fraction of what the US employee would cost, and now we have AI like GTP-4 that is very strong when provided with the right prompts.

We'll see how this all turns out.

US developer salaries are not high because their employers want to be nice, they are high because the employees deliver work that makes/saves much more money than they cost. So in fact there is money to give remote devs in Latin America the same high salaries for the same reasons.

If they instead press salaries down, then I guess the solution is for US devs to move to Latin America and reap the increased quality of life. There is really no good reason for the typical young programmer to live in hostile environments like the US or Europe. In the long run the result is that Latin American based business might out-compete North American, since the talent is there and the customers are world-wide.

> Code quality is good and the pay should cause concern US developers.

> I look at some of the salaries for similar front-end work in SV/SF and it is so out of line compared to this I don't know what to say. "High cost of living" can be discussed all day, but then companies can just hire someone who isn't in a high cost of living area who can do the same thing. For a lot less.

The devs you hired know about this.

Now, they have experience at an American company on their resume. Making it easier for them to jump ship to these jobs in the Bay Area.

Why exactly would anyone move physically when everyone is insisting remote work is as good and no one is collocated anymore?

If you see other threads about hiring, it appears many people are getting jobs solely based of their network. This is much easier and faster to build in person.

They might switch to remote to work for one of these firms, at a much better pay.

Eventually, they might transfer to a team that's more committed to staying in-office and get an L1 company transfer.

I've seen it happen (very frequently). There are very little arbitrage opportunity in this world.

> We have a lot of junior developers out of bootcamps who can't find work due to saturation

Most bootcamps simply aren't that great.

The early bootcamps were extremely selective at choosing students who were already good at math or logical reasoning or some other helpful skill, and putting them through an intense process.

Some combination of policymakers, the HR industry, and the DEI industry then decided that this could scale.

I think people underestimate how much people want to hire from their own country for cultural reasons as well as logistics/HR reasons.

Mexico missed the boat on this big time. Some schools, infrastructure, some training, and they could have had a huge piece of the call center and body shop work that India ended up with. The USA was already shipping factory jobs over there.

I'm not convinced the boat isn't coming, or hasn't already arrived back to port. Lots of great talent in Mexico, and I'm not referring to call center jobs. I'm talking about first class engineers.

Mexico may be behind on remote work but they have the big advantage of being the prime location for manufacturing. Both US and Chinese companies are moving manufacturing to Mexico.

Hi, Lachlan de Crespigny co-founder of Revelo here (my cofounder is quoted in the article). This is absolutely a trend and I really believe it is a massive benefit for the US and for Latin America - more innovation in the US and more good quality jobs in Latam. Once your team is remote, as long as the developers are technically strong, speak English, and work in your timezone, why do you care at all where the person is based? Do you even know where they are working out of? Culturally Latam devs are pretty similar to US devs, they have proven their technical chops with a bunch of mega-success companies built by Latam devs, and there is less Latin senior executives in the US so it is not as competitive to hire as Asia.

I care where my coworkers are based, but not for business reasons as much other than preferring in person work for some tasks.

In the last two years hundreds of nearshoring companies have appeared in the region recruiting devs. I am based in Buenos Aires so I can say that the number is really large. What do I have look in such companies to choose it as an employer? What advantage does Revelo offer over the rest?

PD: of course I saw Revelo ads.

We have been working with Latin American and European developers for years now. We use a recruting/staff augmenation company Mirigos (http://mirigos.com) to help us with search and compliance. Has been a much better experience for us than finding local developers. We chose between Europe and LatAm based on the needs as personalities and cultural fit differes.

A bit like in europe with eastern europe. Fun part is that given the lower taxes and cost of living people there earn more than those in the uk even if pay is lower is 20-30%. Thanks to ir35 and an insane drive to increase taxes that’s becoming more and more common. More expensive than india but also higher quality.

https://archive.ph/1yvX5

Why does anyone think this is replacing employees in Asia, as opposed to replacing employees in the US?

I actually worked for a firm the staff of which was 99% near-shore contractors. Had some great folks there that I had the pleasure to work with. Can't really say as much great things about the US-based C-level structure, but that's neither here nor there.

I really hope this takes off, it would be a huge deal for my country and me personally.

From what I see, and what I'm experiencing, it is and has been taking off.

For the last few years I've been interacting with members from other teams in Latin America and it's been nothing short of a pleasure. Now in the process of building out my own team with engineers from Latin America. Their abilities, experience, communication and maybe most importantly, attitudes/personalities are fantastic.

The downside is competition is heating up. That's my downside, but probably an upside for you :)

Which country is yours btw? How is your related infrastructure/economy/etc for tech jobs? Broadband, WFH situation, etc? Doesn't seem to be a problem for my colleagues in Latin America.

As an American dev who speaks pretty good Spanish, I kind of hope so too. Maybe I'll get a couple of free trips down to south america ;)

We've hired ~15 engineers in LATAM over the last year and a half, mostly in Argentina and Uruguay.

If anyone has any questions about the process, I'm happy to answer them here. Or feel free to email me at the email in my bio.

My company employs contractors from South America and they are great. I am South American myself (moved to the US when very young) so it's nice having people of my background and language around.

As a dev with 3 yoe in canada ( so not a big market like Seattle or SF) what can I do to tell an employer to use me instead?

Communication skills?

Lower cost perhaps? Canada being cheaper than the us it may be an incentive.

Do you want to be in Canada?

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