U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent

My success with outsourcing some work to Latin America has been much, much, much more successful than outsourcing to India and other places in Asia for the following reasons:<p>1. As the article points out, being in the same&#x2F;similar timezones is huge. With so many folks working remotely anyway, it&#x27;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&#x27;s just not worth sacrificing other parts of my life for it, especially when it&#x27;s easy to get a job where this is not necessary.<p>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&#x2F;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 &quot;over-deference&quot; which proved to be extremely detrimental. If anyone has read Malcolm Gladwell&#x27;s book Outliers, it was very similar to what he discusses about Korean Airlines&#x27; cockpit culture.

South American here, I interviewed with a lot of local companies out of school. Mind you the highest offer I saw was $1000&#x2F;month for mid level, also for some reason a lot of interviewers ghosted me (maybe I was not upto their standards of entry level or I failed the tests), so I was feeling like a failure after spending like 2 months job hunting, then it hit me that I could apply to US companies,<p>One week and one interview later I had a job (applied to like 5 companies max) making $3200&#x2F;month as entry level.<p>To be honest I would have taken those local jobs but after such success with us companies I don&#x27;t think I can afford it anymore.<p>Anyway If someone needs a frontend dev, just hmu, email on profile

I am surprised that it took so long to realize that hiring people in the same time zone is better for productivity.<p>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).

I’ve been hiring engineers from pretty much any country for the better part of a decade. It still blows my mind that companies are just figuring this out now.<p>It’s not just contractors either. With tools like remote.com, you can hire FTEs almost anywhere.<p>There is no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of adaptable companies.<p>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.

&quot;Brain Drain&quot; has been a thing for years. I can remember in the late 90s in my Developmental Econ class my Peruvian professor complaining of brain drain from Latin America and how loss of top tier talent affected economic growth. We all appreciated the irony since she herself was a part of the issue she complained about, having studied and taught in the US for quite some time as she was standing up there saying this to us. But I could see her point.

&gt; <i>” If someone is very money-driven, there’s nothing we can do.”</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

I worked for a company that did this. It was (and still is) a complete disaster. They&#x27;ve been around for 5 years and still haven&#x27;t released a product. If you&#x27;re going to do this, you&#x27;d better have an enormous pile of tasks that can be independently handled and programmatically verified. And just assume that communication between your US team and foreign teams will be nonexistent, it&#x27;s best to set expectations low instead of trying to embed people into existing teams.

The headline says &quot;pillaging,&quot; which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is <i>hiring</i> Latin America&#x27;s tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying. Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as &quot;pillaging&quot;. Because I&#x27;m a liberal I don&#x27;t see it that way.<p>Governments often also see this as &quot;pillaging&quot;, since they&#x27;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.<p>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. <i>That&#x27;s</i> 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&#x27;t know about other countries.<p>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&#x27;s strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Disappointed to see no mention of Costa Rica.<p>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.

I’ve hired about 50 Latin American devs as contractors over the last six months or so and they’ve all been absolutely top notch — I will continue to aggressively hire more.<p>Some anecdotal highlights:<p>- great time zone overlap with US business hours<p>- very very good English<p>- very strong engineers who actually take ownership of the products we’re working on<p>- leadership aspirations and drive - I’ve promoted a few folks to team lead positions<p>- shared culture that works in a similar way to US culture

It’s not just Latin America. It’s also Canada, most of Europe, it’s India, Asia, and I’m hearing Africa also experiencing a similar pull.<p>There’s a global talent shortage for <i>experienced</i> people in software engineering, and it’s spilling over everywhere.<p>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).<p>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]).<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;advice-for-tech-workers-to-navigate-a-heated-job-market&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;advice-for-tech-workers-t...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;more-follow-up-hiring-market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;more-follow-up-hi...</a>

I wonder if the reverse is also true, or if we&#x27;re about to see white collar wages in the US get crushed.<p>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.<p>I wonder if we&#x27;re about to see protectionism expand from blue collar politics into white collar politics.

I think this article underestimates the difficulty of finding great talent in Latin America as a remote company. Everybody in Latin America wants to work remotely at foreign companies, yet few actually do in practice.<p>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&#x27;t hire more than a bunch of Latin American engineers compared to dozens of Europeans and North Americans. The skill gap was pretty noticeable.<p>I&#x27;ve observed similar things with friends&#x2F;family in South America which are into engineering. They find it very hard to be qualified enough to get offers from remote companies&#x2F;startups.

IMO I really want tech companies to start hiring in latin america more just for time zone reasons. If India &amp; China was in south america a lot of the pain of having offices from those regions would go away.<p>I&#x27;ve even done several hiring intensives for people from there 3 or 4 years ago.

Id love to hire some Latin American developers for my team. Any pointers on how to find them? Do folks go through outsourcing firms or try to directly hire folks?

Market is stupid crazy right now. My coworkers are leaving because of 2x base offers, we did hiring recently, shortly after we sent an offer we noticed that CV is probably totally made up (inconsistent with Linkedin completely - different companies, different time periods) So instead of 4YoE we are getting 1YoE.<p>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).<p>I already received 2x base offer elsewhere as well, I will probably reject it, as I think I can get even more.

That is great! Latin american are still suspiciously uncommon in tech so there is definitely a neglected talent pool.<p>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...).

I’ve been doing that for 7 years.<p>They’re* only a little more expensive than India&#x2F;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.<p>(*I literally don’t know which South American countries are committing code, just the hourly rate the firm passes to me)

There&#x27;s a company called Auth0, which was comprised of mostly Argentinians. They did quite well for themselves, they got bought out by Okta for 6b.

Is anyone here concerned about an eventual &quot;great salary reset&quot; driven by remote work? Companies don&#x27;t need to cover Bay Area CoL because they can get people from the midwest to do the work, so avg salaries go down. Then, they can get Canadians to do the work, avg salaries go down again. Then, they&#x27;ll get Chilean software engineers to do the work, and avg salaries go down even more.<p>In the short term, we&#x27;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&#x27;t be an issue, but I don&#x27;t plan on being in an office for the rest of my life.

I have been trying to get US companies to hire from Eastern Europe (mainly south eastern europe). My company would act as a middleman (essentially outsourcing), pay money to the devs which would work directly 1:1 for that company. The devs would be working for us, yet, we would not manage their day to day activities - we&#x27;d just act as an HR&#x2F;recruiting&#x2F;legal middleman. I have tried with two major outsourcing companies, yet, they were never that interested. For 100-120k a year, you could get top tier devs with 6-8+ years of experience from Eastern Europe.

Eastern European here. This has been happening for a while. I haven&#x27;t worked for a local (Hungarian) company for 8 years now. And even then it was just 6 months. In the past 14 years, since I&#x27;ve left my last &#x27;real&#x27; job (except for that 6 months mentioned before) I either worked for US or Western European companies or my own startups.<p>So I&#x27;ve been thinking for a while that it&#x27;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&#x27;t know to many people who did this, it has accelerated quite a bit.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure about the US situation (especially not the entry level salaries), but it seems that at least in part it&#x27;s about the fact that as a senior you can find a remote job pretty easily.

No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some information about the topic.

I&#x27;ve worked with partners in Colomba, Costa Rica, Argentina. There&#x27;s a lot of talent for sure. My last place had a bid back office in Colombia, but it seemed like we were already running up against market capacity even a few years ago and competition for talent was heating up. The pay scales are already much higher than Asia.

It is, more than EVER, time to return to SIMPLICITY. As it&#x27;s been said, most applications aren&#x27;t that special and shouldn&#x27;t demand overly specialized developers. Much like it used to be during back in the day, the old times of xBase languages and other contemporary technologies. Even though, nowadays even a simple CRUD app is expected to have &quot;improved&quot; UX, modern UI, mobile support, front and backend developers and other unnecessary intricacies which adds to overall projects costs while adding zero value to end-products. That has to stop and the conditions for ending this collective self-delusion are better than ever.

I saw this first hand last Spring when I was visiting family in Mexico. One of my sister&#x27;s friends there is a web developer and we really hit it off. A native born Mexican, he told me about how he works for a tech company out of Utah, but through a locally owned company. He then went on to explain that this is the nature of his entire company and that this is a popular trend in the industry there. I honestly couldn&#x27;t be happier for them, not sure he could have made that good of a living doing only local work.

I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for inflated tech salaries in US metros. Those areas will seriously suffer if corporations decide they are no longer willing to pay through the nose to support the insane cost of living in NYC, SF, etc.<p>And white-collar Americans in tech will finally get to suffer along with the rest of the country as the American system of &quot;spend more for a worse life&quot;. It shouldn&#x27;t be so hard to keep a basic middle-class lifestyle, with historically low inflation, but it is.

Latin American here. In my last year of college, I got a pretty decently-paid job at a local IT&#x2F;tech company. Later that year I got hired by a FAANG, and my salary grew threefold. No wonder most of my college friends moved abroad as well.<p>In my country, the retail industry dreads Amazon&#x27;s looming expansion. They&#x27;ve started hiring ex-Amazonians to try to catch up. I wonder if they&#x27;ve raised the salaries to match.

&gt;“An American company was offering him $15,000 per month to work for them,” Campos told Rest of World. “We cannot compete with that.”<p>Wow, that&#x27;s crazy. As a (senior?) software engineer based in Chile who was recently hired by an American company for around $3.5k&#x2F;mo (that was my offer) I am now feeling underpaid. :)<p>Assuming that this information is correct, I am now wondering how much I could get away with next time around...

It&#x27;s not just Latin America. Most of my acquaintances here in Western Europe are getting remote jobs at American companies.<p>Honestly, this should concern everyone who lives in the US. I remember the big push for remote work being the &quot;new normal&quot; and thinking how this would bite people who live in more expensive areas. Well... here you go.

As an American who is currently working on transitioning out of IT management into software development, this post and these comments have really made me feel like it’s not possible. This is quite the blow as I have been very much enjoying learning these new skills. Am I wasting my time?

What&#x27;s the point of even hiring American tech talent anymore. For companies that still hire American engineers, are they really 3-4x better than engineers from countries where the average wage of software engineers is 3-4x less?

Prior discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30073727" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30073727</a><p>Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.

Not just hiring, I&#x27;ve been asked to move there last year. It&#x27;s the new &quot;outsource to india&quot;

Wheres a good place to find &quot;DevOps&quot;&#x2F;SRE type people in the EST timezone in LatAm?

How can I help my company recruit better in Latin America? Is an outside agency the only way?

I knew this was the reason that everybody is asking for fluent English on every position

People underestimate cultural difference and even pretend they don&#x27;t exist.<p>Even within a culture there are people who don&#x27;t fit into the dominant cultural values and way of working. A big part of diversity and inclusion is addressing that.<p>This becomes an even bigger problem when dealing with other cultures.<p>And you might find that other cultures don&#x27;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.