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.
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 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.
E.g. open-ended, no direct requirement to reply in a negative manner, etc.
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 assertion that it only helps employees who don't deliver is not accounting for any variance factors that may not be obvious immediately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not much different to the contracting world in IT, really.
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
IIRC after six months of contracting an employee is considered full time regardless of the mechanism of hiring.
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.
More developed countries could, and should, learn a thing or two from that.
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.
Colombia is catching up but ARG and URU still reign supreme.
don't worry I made that mistake and one engineer was trying to get my address to send me "the shirt"
Big fan of Colombia. They're in the middle of a real boom.
Lotta business, esp. manufacturing, in Mexico as well; they've recently overtaken China and Canada as the US' number one trading partner.
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.
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've seen cases of top developers earning almost 50% less than their peers because they were hired via subcontractors.
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).
I would’ve figured it would be an amazing situation being in lcol earning a lot
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!
Worked with the Office team in ... Bengaluru? Fantastic engineers.
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.
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.