Many of the founders I know (who started companies in the past 3 years) are primarily hiring in LATAM too.
I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers.
Just not so great for those of us in the US.
Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF.
This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad.
But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore.
And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
It’s also much harder in general to communicate less formally and form deep relationships.
For execs and managers, this can be a big problem.
If it isn’t possible to do it the ‘old way’, remote work can and does work (albeit in different ways and with different constraints). But if doing remote work, why not do it somewhere else?
If you're totally disconnected from the work, sure. But for someone actually paying, it shouldn't be that hard to see whether the list of priorities for this month is actually getting finished or not.
Outsourcing manufacturing had the same problem - people thought they could send drawings to China, and with some straightforward checks, could get what they wanted cheaper. That was not at all the case, however, and there is a LOT of QA, additional checks, additional data leakage and competitive risks, etc.
For instance, if in the US people might actually follow the law around things like NDAs and non-competes most of the time, what about the jurisdiction you’re outsourcing too? How would you even know? How would you enforce consequences? How about data security?
Sounds more like a personal problem than a technical one. Besides, if it was actually enough of an issue there wouldn't be so much outsourcing. I just see it as more smokescreens to cut costs.
It saves a ton of money if you can get people to buy the end product (costs are often literally 1/2 or 1/10th). Profit is a major motivator.
Only if you are thinking like a McDonald’s shift manager. Measuring software developers by time-in-seat is tacitly acknowledging that your managers aren’t doing their jobs up to the C-suite.
“Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.
I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.
Right now (and back then), primary focus was on cost. Got to juice those margins somehow, and it isn’t going to happen by opening new markets (probably!).
When outsourcing is less envogue, it’s usually because there is some big growth opportunity and they are trying to get things moving as fast as possible. That tends to require higher end (but more expensive!) staff working in closer communication with management/execs.
It’s the difference between trying to improve margins on an existing product, and trying to grow the top end of a new product.
5 years won't change that lol. tata is still going to suck, the difference is now there is TCS in LATAM. same for cap gemini, cognizant, hcl, etc.
If you look at the table of salaries of a big union [1], you can multiply that number by about 13.5 to get the annual salary. Can vary a little %, but a good estimation.
The salaries in the EU stagnated in the last years, whereas in USA they were moving.
[1] https://www.igmetall.de/download/20240809_Metall_Elektroindu...
For 50k net per year, or ~4k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~80k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~57k EUR.
For 75k net per year, or ~6k per month, in most other countries you need to earn ~130k EUR per year (gross). In Bulgaria, you need ~85k EUR.
Go figure, these are really large differences and that very well might be the reason why we see a lot of big companies there. Tax is unusually low.
$ python zaplata.py 10000
10000
neto : 10000 -> bruto= 11680.23, razhod: 12445.10
bruto: 10000 -> neto = 8487.80, razhod: 10764.88
$ python zaplata.py -2024 10000
-2024
10000
neto : 10000 -> bruto= 11627.86, razhod: 12322.36
bruto: 10000 -> neto = 8534.93, razhod: 10694.50
p.s. And no, i do not see a change here - all is still dead - am looking since september