U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent(restofworld.org)
restofworld.org
U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
https://restofworld.org/2022/latin-america-startup-developer-scarcity/
349 comments
I tend to agree with you having worked with IBM's global consulting services and their workforce in both India and Brazil many moons ago.
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.
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.
I went to Brazil with some friends for the World Cup in 2014. For the bigger, more important matches the entire country left work early and everything (except for bars, etc.) closed down for the day. Quite literally.
Absolutely. World cup matches might as well be impromptu national holidays at this point. Carnaval also has huge impact on productivity.
Sounds like Italy.
> 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
This is absolutely true during a World Cup
The difference between IST and any US hours is my current pain. I have to get up at 5am (and sometimes even 4am) for a meeting that still requires the developers in India to stay late. I get maybe 2 hours of overlap, and everything else has to happen via async email.
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.
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.
Having to support every timezone is my biggest pain. Occasionally Europe, occasionally India, occasionally china, occasionally eastern US.
Multiple meetings with random times between 0Z and 24Z in the same day makes it hard to plan on when to sleep.
Multiple meetings with random times between 0Z and 24Z in the same day makes it hard to plan on when to sleep.
while I agree with what you are saying, Gladwell's example may not be very good http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-...
That article... doesn't seem very compelling? It seems like a bit part of the thesis is KAL's planes getting shot down by Soviets doesn't reflect badly on the pilots. I personally see "flying into terrain" and "flying into a war zone" as fairly interchangeable concepts, just with different survival probabilities.
Time zones don't matter as much s youd think. Most of my oversees vendors are working the equivalent of 2nd and 3rd shifts and prefer not to have earlier meetings as they aren't working yet. It surprised me too.
My own experiences are identical to yours. Not 90%, not 99%, 100% identical.
South American here, I interviewed with a lot of local companies out of school. Mind you the highest offer I saw was $1000/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,
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
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
Looks like you’re in Venezuela. How do you get paid by Americans?
You can pay them as independent contractors. They have to sign a W-8 BEN and you can make payments via Wise. If you see that you are hiring a relatively large team from the same country, then at some point you can open a local subsidiary (cost center) and employ them via the local entity. The way to do this has been the same - most US companies became open to this after 2020.
The question was about Venezuela because of the sanctions. It’s not just any country that works with Wise
Venezuela is banned on wise and many/most banking apps. https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...
Venezuela is banned on wise and many/most banking apps. https://wise.com/help/articles/2978049/which-countries-can-i...
Ah yes, sorry, didn't catch that.
Through paypal, im hired as a contractor, have to send invoices and stuff
I think the question was more about how your employers are violating US sanctions against your country.
US Sanctions to Venezuela are directed at the government, pdvsa and banks controlled by the government, not at individuals or companies unrelated to them. There's still a lot of business happening between venezuela and the us
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/....
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/....
Bitcoin
People are downvoting but this is correct - I know many being paid in USDT and USDC as well. One benefit is the central bank doesn’t steal your US currency and replace it with the worse (inflationary, poorly accepted) local currency.
HN is no different than the masses. Very few people on here take the time to research or review. They prefer to be spoon-fed.
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...
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...
No, no it is not correct. They replied and they are paid with PayPal, not Bitcoin.
I am surprised that it took so long to realize that hiring people in the same time zone is better for productivity.
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 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).
We have been trying for years actually, there just isn't that many to hire as the article said :( There is a reason why all tech worker offices seem to be from east/west europe, china, india, USA and canada. Oracle has had offices in mexico for quite a while for example.
It's interesting to hear of requiring code reviews approved by the main office team. That's a strategy we've adopted on my team, and I got pushback for it. Good to hear that it's not out of the ordinary. The technical quality of the work is typically good, but oftentimes the domain knowledge isn't there due to the T+12 issue meaning little time for overlap.
Language/education/infrastructure barrier in Latin America, for some countries at least. Situation is improving as of late but a large skill gap both in terms of education and foreign lang skills (English). Hiring in India was painful for some reasons, but everyone spoke English and education was top level due to intense competition.
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.
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.
I have a first hand experience working with a great team at Trinidad and Tobago. Maybe we got lucky in finding them, but I've got an impression that good universities exist and therefore there's a steady supply of capable new grads.
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.
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.
Overall, Latin America has way less STEM graduates per capita than they need and is absolutely unable to fill the demand. Some countries might fare better than others but the trend is overall that most companies will end up competing for the few graduates that do exist. The article also pointed this out.
https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?country...
Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and then...why not Europe?
https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h77528693?country...
Many tech companies are West coast so you're +5 hours and then...why not Europe?
Having 3 hours of overlap during the regular work day is going to be much easier than no overlap during the normal work day and people having to work early/late for meetings.
Language/education/infrastructure are a lot easier to change that timezone, at least
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.
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.
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.
But why do all these companies have to be in america? One often hears about companies hiring remotely, but hardly ever establishing remotely.
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Well, I guess most of these have been in existence for a while. Also, as an American founder, why would you establish it anywhere but there? The idea is that you make money there (or make money globally, which is still easier starting from there) and hire remotely. Which is going to be cheaper. Or you get better talent for the same salary, which is another way to put it. So the company being from a developed market (could be Western Europe too) is an important part of the equation.
Not sure! I encourage people to travel as much as possible. Start companies wherever you want. The internet provides almost unlimited resources to do this. There’s really no excuse why you have to be in the US, or start in the US. Start wherever you want.
To be close to customers?
close? it s the internet dude
We are not in Metaverse yet. 'Internet people' (your customers) live at real places, order real stuff, has different expectations, use different tools (payment, security..) differently in different geographies.
"Brain Drain" 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.
In the past brain drain meant good professionals would leave their countries to live in the US or Europe.
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.
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.
Also causing the prices in some sectors, such as real estate, to raise abnormally.
This is a misconception that a few hundred of devs in a city can do this.
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.
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.
That seems unlikely, unless the couple tech workers can buy out the whole town
In the long term though this is not good for the home countries, they are left behind and at best become tourist destinations. There is no country that pulled itself forward this way, not even with remote work. Eastern europe is an example with very low growth rates since the fall of communism.
Yeah, it's really interesting but also a huge economic opportunity for countries if they can figure out enough reforms without these people to make the country attractive enough that these people come back with all their experience (and networks) and help boost the economy even further.
Yup. Initial foreign investment in China was mostly driven by Hong Kong and Taiwan (many of these investors were first or second-generation from the mainland), and other parts of the Chinese diaspora.
Unless these people start building companies in said countries this does not benefit the countries. They re essentially tourists
Do you think she didn't realize the irony herself? It's not a negative against her person anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with complaining about or arguing against a system you're taking part of and/or benefiting from.
Wonder how WFH brain drain where talent stays in their respective countries shake things up. At least keeps some money and expertise circulating in the local economies. Also going to be interesting when Chinese academic institutions start climbing the ranking charts and training foreign talent who has no long term prospects in immigration unfriendly PRC. Perhaps a future where more "sea turtles" return to develop home countries after than be permanently brain drained in the west.
> ” If someone is very money-driven, there’s nothing we can do.”
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.
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.
Am Brazilian, used to work in a very big, well-paying company. It's astounding the amount of amazing talent that left the company during the 2 years I worked there (myself included [not that I'm amazing talent, I just got lucky]). There's no way Brazilian companies can keep up with the talent evasion going on in tech right now, specially because of the exchange rate of USD x BRL.
They're just going to have to bite the bullet and pay more. It really is that simple. If they can't find developers, they aren't paying enough and are trying to cheap out on talent acquisition.
Fact is, there are occupations that pay a nice salary in Brazil, even after conversion to US$, even with the current exchange. Brazil is not poor; lots of flashy cars on the streets, upscale bars and restaurants are shock full day after day.
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.
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.
Government bureaucrats aren't really providing any vital service to be honest. I understand the doctor thing though. Why would anyone want to bust their ass in medical school in order to live in hospitals if they can make more money writing software instead? Health care workers are losing value fast in Brazil and quality is going to drop.
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.
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.
It was just an example, a juxtaposition of "respectable" professsions/occupations vs the humble software engineer that now wants to be respected too.
The doctors I know still make many times more than a software engineer with a remote job. And they deserve it.
The doctors I know still make many times more than a software engineer with a remote job. And they deserve it.
I worked for a company that did this. It was (and still is) a complete disaster. They've been around for 5 years and still haven't released a product. If you're going to do this, you'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's best to set expectations low instead of trying to embed people into existing teams.
And I worked for a company where it worked beautifully; the remote folks (who were very carefully picked) meshed perfectly with the team (and better than many of the native folks).
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.
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.
Yeah, several things my (former) company did that made it worse:
- 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").
- 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").
Newsflash: competent senior engineers in LatAm with 10+ years of experience are not dramatically cheaper than US engineers outside of NY/SF.
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.
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.
That's the case for any good dev, anywhere in the world. If they're not chained to their job for various non-work reasons, they <<will>> move on to competitive salaries.
So this is very, very different and incomparable situation than presented in the article or discussed in the comments. The same issues could present if you bought incompetent company in the US.
The language barrier was 80% of the problem. Everything else could have worked out if we had been on board and the management handled it correctly. The engineers were good enough.
Language barrier would be something that you could filter on within 15 minutes of recruiter screen talking with the candidate.
I can hardly imagine that situation working out if the company you acquired were in the US.
You company basically did everything wrong.
Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
Remote teams that are selected well can be a pleasure to work with for everybody involved.
The point was not to say that hiring remotely is a fraught endeavor, it was a cautionary tale to any execs out there who might get it in their head that this is generally a good idea. It can go very very wrong.
Well, a remote hire is generally super easy to fire. A local employee can go to court and really mess things up!
Maybe in Europe, but in the USA where the laws are "right to work", it's just as easy to fire an employee whether they are remote or on site.
I know firing is easy in the US. But almost nobody from abroad will open a lawsuit against a company. While a local could be incentivised to do so or at least complain to various institutions or try small claims court.
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.
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.
The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America'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 "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.
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.
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.
That's part and parcel of deep, amalgamated, problems our countries suffer from. I receive in crypto, live in south america and still sleep worry-free. I just do a good job and happen to heap benefits from all this shit we're immersed in (ridiculous low prices for everything) and from working for a rich country. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, no matter how deep I look. I don't even worry about how my countrymen see this, I simply don't have a reason to tell them. Creating reliable and safe systems is the one talent I have, I might as well concentrate on that and leave political issues to those capable of grasping them.
I'm a half-retired Argentinian developer still living in Argentina. I second the parent comment 100%
> The headline says "pillaging," which is a kind of stealing by force. But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is hiring Latin America'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 "pillaging". Because I'm a liberal I don't see it that way.
> 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.
> 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.
The salary differences are smaller, in large part because the governments have taken very different policies over the last century. Latin American governments are, by and large, continuing with the policies that have been producing economic disasters throughout that century, though Argentina is among the worse cases.
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.
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.
They're not much smaller when one factors in the extreme taxes we have to pay in Europe. 49% of a salary for a senior SRE position vaporizes in taxes before it reaches me. That's a salary that would be decent but not great for the same title in the US subject to US taxes. And my union told me they've never seen such a high salary with that title before when I sought their counsel during negotiations.
It's hard to tell, but I think there may be a big difference between "51% of a salary that would be decent but not great" and "literally paying people five times less than a decent salary", which is what the article described. Like, maybe a factor of two. And in Europe you get something extra for those taxes, while generally in South America public services and infrastructure are worse than in the US, not better.
>the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people
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
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
Another name for it is Tall Poppy Syndrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
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It’s interrelated. It’s part resentment, part mediocrity, part laziness.
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.
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.
And if people get rich with just a bit of hard work, that's a convenient kudgel to beat poor people over the head with. Clearly, they were too lazy or stupid to get rich.
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.
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.
I don't know to what extent you can disentangle cause and effect in human psychology. Certainly if you believe rich people are evil, you will feel justified in tearing them down, so you will tend to tear them down more, in which case it's a cause of the crab-bucket mentality. But you might also just feel a lot of envy for rich people and consequently engage in motivated reasoning that leads you to believe that they are evil, in which case it's an effect.
(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.
(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.
Capitalism really gave the wealthy a reason to not hurt the up and coming, by requiring the newcomers to pay tribute to the old rich.
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
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
In a competitive market, if your customers don't think your products do them good, they won't pay for them, so you won't be profitable. If they don't think they do them much good, they won't pay much for them, so you'll be less profitable.
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!
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!
The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s pervasive in all LA. I’d dare to say it can be found in Spain/Portugal as well.
I think it comes from the cultural influence of Spain, not Catholicism. I don't see it in Ireland or Switzerland, and not much in France, though they all have large Catholic populations. More generally, I think it comes from the cultural influence of feudalism. Catholicism teaches that wrath, covetousness, and envy are mortal sins, and strongly endorses property rights. Rallying people to confiscate their neighbor's property in order to improve their own situation involves all three of those mortal sins. (To be fair, running a successful business involves a certain amount of covetousness, too.)
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.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona
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.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Laureano_Maradona
Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order.
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.
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.
> Catholicism endorses a peculiar idea of social justice founded on commutative justice, viz. paying the pre-determined "just" or "fair" price as opposed to whatever most efficient price might be set by the market - far more strongly than it might endorse property rights. Property rights are really only acknowledged to the extent that they might tend to preserve a rigid, authoritarian social order.
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.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P8D.HTM
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.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P8D.HTM
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justp... says:
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].
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].
It's true that commutative justice is important to the Catholic conception of social justice, but I don't think the rest of your paragraph is generally true of Catholics.
You're probably right that it doesn't come from Catholicism, but it still can be based on it. I.e. be explained by it, used as a motivation for the said behaviour. Religions are quite malleable, Christianity (in general) is no different. Full of contradictions that open the possibilities of quite different interpretations by emphasizing one or the other of the contradicting pieces of informations.
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.)
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.)
Oh, agreed! And you can't read the story of the dude kicking the moneychangers out of the temple without feeling that he wasn't super enthusiastic about commerce.
Those countries you mentioned aren’t as archetypically Catholic as Spain. Also, remember that the version of Catholicism that made its way to LA through colonialism was, in essence, medieval. While in Europe new ideas entered and became established in the Christian religion, we were stuck with the medieval version of Catholicism for several centuries. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that new ideas started entering the collective consciousness.
Right, I think it's more about being medieval than being Catholic.
Why European influences, vs the experiences of people that the Europeans screwed over to become wealthy?
This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft.
This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft.
In my comment, I said, "Spain spent 300 years living off the plunder from Latin America and its other overseas territories, which of course perpetuated the power of plunderers." This was the beginning of my second paragraph's topic sentence. You responded, "This seems to ignore the history of bad people stealing land to make themselves rich, and the continuing wealth from that theft." Perhaps you intended to post your comment in response to a different comment? Or possibly you don't know what "plunder" means?
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.
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.
Argentina used to be a first-world developed country in the late 19th and early 20th century. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality only took root there as a result of left-wing populist politics.
Argentina was a successful cow product exporter, then cow products became cheap elsewhere
Well, not really. The end of the cow-product-based Argentine Golden Age didn't come from US feedlots; those were still decades in the future. It came from the Smoot-Hawley act and its beggar-thy-neighbor brethren worldwide: our economy, which had grown fat from its abundant and fine exports, suddenly found the gates closed to those exports and the drawbridges drawn up, almost everywhere in the world, precipitating the fall of democracy and the Década Infame. Within three years exports had fallen by almost two thirds, an economic disaster in an export-driven economy.
Argentina had left-wing politics in the 19 teens, well before it got really rich.
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. 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.
The opinion you are quoting is just the typical "not real socialism" stuff from people who don't want to admit that their ideology destroys everything it touches. They are doing it right now with Venezuela. 15 years ago they called Venezuela the future of left wing activism in South America, today they claim it was really right wing all along.
Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler, modeling his policies explicitly and in some detail on Mussolini's, and when he had to flee Argentina, he went to Franco's Spain. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power largely on their opposition to socialism, though they did of course attempt to co-opt its more popular policies (and in the case of Hitler even its name), and Franco's opponents in the Spanish Civil War were anarchists who were very explicitly extreme left wing. When Perón returned to Argentina, there were left-wing and right-wing factions of the Peronist Party, who immediately started killing each other --- like, literally at the airport when his plane came in. (This is not a literary invention by Garcia Márquez; it actually happened historically.) Perón sided with the right-wing factions.
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.
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.
>Perón was close personal friends with Mussolini and Hitler
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.
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.
It's true that FDR was left-wing, that he expressed admiration for Mussolini, that Stalin persecuted Trotsky and his followers, and that for 22 months the USSR and Germany were invading other countries instead of fighting each other.
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.
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.
Argentina was quite rich, relative to the rest of the world, in 1950.
Kind of, though nothing like our golden age of the 01920s. But we didn't have high levels of literacy or lots of expert machinists; we were still living off our ag exports and creating unprecedented levels of economic inequality. And then Perón redirected us towards North-Korea-style autarky and cult of personality, purged the universities of ideological dissent, and valorized ignorance: Haga patria, mate a un estudiante, and alpargatas sí, libros no. Economic development became impossible. The post-Perón dictatorships were just as anti-intellectual.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez is pro-capitalist. I said nothing about real socialism.
This is as far from the truth as mrjangles's comments.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/gabriel-garcia-marquez-ou...
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/gabriel-garcia-marquez-ou...
Gabriel Garcia Márquez is a famous socialist, a big supporter of Fidel Castro...etc.
No, Argentina was never either a first-world country or a developed country. What we were is rich, because a small population had conquered a large territory that yielded limitless amounts of beef, and with the advent of refrigerated shipping, that meant amounts of wealth limited only by how many cowboys and meatpackers you could hire. The self-defeating crab bucket mentality was already well in place during the Argentine civil wars, and the distance from the rhetoric of Juan Manuel de Rosas to that of Perón was really just as small as Perón claimed.
Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
Also I really think it's a stretch to call Perón left-wing. Are you talking about the Montoneros?
Poaching would be the more correct word to use.
That's literally dehumanizing. You're reducing human beings to game animals, and you're analogizing giving them a lot of money to shooting them dead and butchering them. From whose perspective is that a sensible analogy? Only someone who thinks the employees are, or should be, their chattels.
The word poach can be used more generally.
Yes, any word can be used metaphorically. I just don't like the metaphor in this case.
Poaching is used across the industry for workforce quite commonly
[deleted]
For companies it's one thing, but for governments it could be different.
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.
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.
I do think people should pay their taxes in order to fund the next generation of universal prenatal medical care, education, etc., but having them work for local companies for 20% of the market rate means they only have 20% as much income to tax, so we can only fund 20% as much education and medical care. You might think this would be compensated by vastly increased profits for the companies, but it isn't, because the low wages mean it's profitable to set people to work on low-value projects.
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.
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.
Disappointed to see no mention of Costa Rica.
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.
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.
FWIW, Microsoft is hiring in Costa Rica. More specifically the M365 Core team. I work with a few of Costa Ricans.
There's also Intel and Amazon. I wonder if/when more tech companies will eventually set up offices in CR. They'd be very welcome and could get some tax benefits establishing in a free zone, for example.
Intel used to build their best chips in Costa Rica. Sorry for the useless trivia.
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.
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
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
Do they grind leetcode or are they so cheap you don’t care?
I hire through a contracting agency that prescreens for me. I do a short behavioral interview then hire. And I wouldn’t call them cheap, I pay many of them more than I’ve made in the US in the last 10 years
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.
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...
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...
This is exactly what university students in the U.S. and abroad have been faced with. Most engineers with a paycheck simply don't get the problem. Competition is higher now than ever for entry, companies do not want to hire graduates, they do not want to invest resources into them. They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project. We are racing to the bottom and the natural result is the U.S's software dominance will be gone sooner than later. Just like manufacturing we are seeing an exportation of work en mass.
Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code.
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.
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.
This is the sweet spot that products like LeetCode or BinarySearch could be used to solve - people who have the academic background, and should know how to code if they're coming out of a good program, but don't have a portfolio of work to show or a catalogue of experience to draw examples and answers from for a typical interview. And all the DSA stuff that is irrelevant for 90% of dev jobs 90% of the time is still fresh in their mind.
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.
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 can't do LeetCode to save my life. I'm not that kind of natural Google-tier genius.
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 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.
At this point in the game hiring based on LC isn't optimizing for hiring people who can code (I think that may have been the case 3-4 years ago), so we don't use it for anyone. Now it's just optimizing for people who have A) heard of LC (who cares); B) have a basic understanding of DSA (good); C) have taken the necessary 0.5-3 months to memorize the handful of patterns that show up (who cares). I can understand why companies like FAANG that get thousands of resumes use it as a filter, though.
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.
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.
Nothing is perfect.
I have about a decade of real professional coding experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can write code. I can count on one finger the number of interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch. There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah and the deafening silence of _any_ interest.
This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
What do you mean by "someone like me?" Your reality is not any reality I've experienced.
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.
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.
You either have a location problem or more likely a CV/keyword problem.
If you're still breathing and have more than 2-3 years of dev experience you should at least be contacted.
If you're still breathing and have more than 2-3 years of dev experience you should at least be contacted.
Not going to lie, as soon as you mentioned LC I was disinterested. But your suggestion sounds good. A few easy/medium questions and maybe the ability to Google sounds fair. I sort of enjoy basic fizz bang code screenings.
And just to be clear I'm only suggesting it for junior positions. Most of the time I think you can suss out whether someone can code by discussing their direct contributions to previous projects. If not, you can always do one LC problem.
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).
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).
I've interviewed a lot of software engineer candidates. It's always surprising how often people with impressive resumes, including computer science degrees from good-to-great universities, can't code at all.
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.
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.
Plenty of people here on HN will tell you they choke in interview situations. A lot of people just aren't comfortable and it gets to them.
That said there are people who really can't code, from my experience working with such folks.
That said there are people who really can't code, from my experience working with such folks.
"Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code."
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.
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.
How are you on leetcode?
I believe LC wasn't a thing back then, or at least not mainstream.
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 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.
Oh, I didn't realize you were talking about a time long ago.
Yeah, I'm old. That was 10+ years ago.
Nah, you're a youngster.
You're only as old as you feel. I feel like I'm ancient.
A friend of mine who died recently worked on Stretch at IBM. Later, he was one of the early employees of a hot cloud computing startup, in 01968.
Yeah, but there's increasingly no place for me in the working world. I'm decent at a lot of things, but not an expert. I'm no longer relevant.
I suppose I was once part of the problem back when I marked assignments in grad school. We're heavily incentivized to not fail students. There's virtually no difference in grades between a 10x programmer and someone who can barely code fizzbuzz in their 4th year.
Currently in a Canadian college for cybersecurity and the content of the courses are being nerfed and the quality of the graduates are churning out are largely dogshit.
> There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor.
This is the exact concept of an IQ test. They aren't labor intensive.
This is the exact concept of an IQ test. They aren't labor intensive.
A cs graduate isn't somebody that can code; those are only loosely related to each other
> Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code
Have they ever been?
Have they ever been?
Universities today seem to be focusing on quantity of education not quality
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.
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.
Universities were never job training programs, their product has always been the right to engage in class signaling. By paying the university a pile of money you signified to potential employers (and everyone else) that you were a member of at least the upper middle class, with the financial resources (and sometimes family connections) to support making those payments of time and money. Not having that signifier was a signal that you lacked the time and money to dump into that effort, given that you had to spend so much of it surviving.
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.
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.
I agree with all of that....
This is in part due to blue politics in universities pushing for more and more genericism in education, suiciding their skill output. The other part is the companies that should be involved in education and funding educational programs simply don't care to. This is the one single way to know if the "shortage" is real: is the company willing to invest in education? The answer has been no. Fewest scholarships, fewest interns, they don't fund programs, and they treat students as cash cows.
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.
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.
Racing to the bottom by paying talent more and more and more?
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.
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.
I haven't seen any company do that in a very long time. What industry are you working in?
I work in e-commerce at Shopify. My company is building some great developer experience stuff for the long-term like some truly excellent cloud-development environments.
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.
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.
That's just long term product planning. The rest of the people here are talking about long term employee development - making your employees more valuable so they produce better products rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced.
> rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced
But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
Not most of the employers I deal with. Wages are exactly where they've been for decades.
Paying more money doesn't mean you're investing into entry level employees necessarily.
The goalposts are all over the place in this thread.
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.
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.
> The goalposts are all over the place in this thread.
yeah, they really are. no one said anything about terrible companies, smh.
yeah, they really are. no one said anything about terrible companies, smh.
If I wanted to get a tech masters degree, my company would pay for it. If I want to learn a new technology, my manager will absolutely allow me to spend time doing that. I’m constantly working on projects that force me to learn new technologies. I feel like my company had no problems with my becoming more valuable. It’s mostly up to me.
My first job was at a startup and they simply didn't have any money to hire experienced people, so it was petty much only people fresh from uni.
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).
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).
This is not true. I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.
> I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.
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.
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.
That's news to me.
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.
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.
Seems weird. If they're willing to wait many more months to hire their perfect candidate, couldn't they do it faster by hiring somebody good and allowing for some ramp up?
The "talent shortage" is self caused by FAANG. Your company does not invest in education, yet expects people to be experienced. Accreditation for compsci and others is sorely out of touch with the tech industry, and university programs are not funded. We are literally strangling the life out of young adults with course materials that don't matter, expenses they have to work manual labor to pay, classes that don't teach, and making them have to sort through dumpsters to find an Arduino. It's that bad. What do tech companies do when asked to sponsor a program? No response. They don't care unless it's from a FAANG employee themselves, if that.
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.
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.
Maybe your company is the exception.
The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.
The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.
We're not really exporting work as much as hiring people to come over here. Or, it's not as clear cut as just exporting manufacturing.
They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project.
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?
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?
The talent abroad ends up working for US companies though, how will dominance dissipate. The market and financing is in the US.
I dont agree with your rather pesimistic view on the matter. I know many companies having fresh new graduates in their hire strategy because that just works in the long rong.
Proven fact. Also most companies have smart people not shortsighted and they come up with proper long term strategies. There might be foolish companies as you describe but not the majority.
Anecdata but in my experience it's definitely true in Africa, I did a project for a Cameroonian tech company recently and they couldn't afford to compete with major tech co's with remote roles which is where anyone decent and semi-senior went. They ended up with a mishmash tech team in Algeria and Ukraine mostly although they would have much preferred to hire local. I heard this story many times in the tech community there and in Kenya.
Same in Tunisia. Remote and France have swooped practically most of the tech talent. You are forced with either mediocre developers or to pay EU rates.
Shouldn't mediocre be generally acceptable? It seems unreal to expect the majority to be above average.
My experience is mediocre is insufficient in SW preojects. You NEED some good technical pillars, else it will all be shit.
Then 75% of software is shit?
Yes.
This feels like a gross over exaggeration.
Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is shit
Isn't that law basically saying that absolutes aren't 100% accurate?
No. It's saying exactly what it sounds like, that most of everything is at a very low level of quality.
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.
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.
Problem is, if you are outsourcing remotely, you want someone who is quite competent for him to be able to work on his own and pick up on the lack of face to face meetings. Mediocre as a result will give less than mediocre results or no results.
Or there's a need for communication. It doesn't matter if the person is "quite competent" if they're on their own building something that doesn't fit the requirements. An average dev shouldn't have any issue being able to Google the occasional problem. The vast majority of the issue we have with outsourced work is subpar English communication.
> Or there's a need for communication.
> 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.
> 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.
I'm not worth anything.
On the ground, this seems to be demonstrably false. I have numerous current and former coworkers that would love opportunities elsewhere.
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.
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.
I'd go further and say it's not just the recruiters that are the problem, but the automation of recruiting that is the problem.
Hiring is a people skill, not an algorithm skill.
Hiring is a people skill, not an algorithm skill.
Preach!
I think US salaries are more to do with it than anything else. It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies. So they hire where talent is cheaper. It was obvious it will happen with remote work.
I’ve been at and seen plenty of places where a growing layer of middle management was paying for itself by outsourcing engineers. Outsourced engineers very often need much more management and company directors either lose touch or decide to run the company in ways that justify raising their own salaries.
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.
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.
This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivial for an in-house on-site engineer to make. It's not unique to her particular company; this is the way her industrial customers and suppliers work too. The backend software is managed the same way. Buy Oracle/MS/Google whatever integrated functionality, and hire consultants to make changes. No expertise in-house.
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.
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.
This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I guess the problem currently is that the incumbents aren't actually getting replaced. Doing a good job is just a means for a small number of people to make an enormous amount of money while everyone benefits from their quality for perhaps a handful of years before they're bought out to be eaten or destroyed by the existing big players.
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.
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.
The ERP that my company uses is proprietary and they charge large sums of money to make custom changes. I am an in house developer that has gotten to know the database backing the ERP and have extrapolated functionality based on stored procedures and table schemas. The work I do would cost my company much more than my salary and I build interfaces that connect to marketplaces or marketplace API aggregators such as ChannelAdvisor. I can attest to your statement that in house engineers can cost much less than the modification engineers who know the system but will charge an arm and a leg.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the company armored themselves against this sort of competency attack against The Machine by having in-house IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse engineered. This does have the additional side effect of making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to implement in-house statistical process control. Which, again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be diplomatic here... discover which processes could be improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of process.
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".
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".
SPOF can be applied to the ERP company themselves. Services fail all of the time. DockerHub failed on Friday with their container API which you could argue made it impossible to know the outcome of your builds but you could still get by and pull your containers after pushing repositories. As someone who understands how I can be a single point of failure I make sure to ask for raises within reason and since I love what I do usually means at market rate. It's not like I am holding a company hostage by knowing what value I bring. Not everyone is of the persuasion of extorting their employer due to what their perceptive value is. My time is valuable but not so valuable that I price myself out of a market by my ego. To add to the backstory I have been an employee of the company for the last 4 years with never an intention of leaving nor an intention of taking advantage of any perceived leverage. Some people will disagree and say that I should advocate for more at all times. My perception is either I start my own company and build my ideas/imagination or I keep doing what I do. Why does everything have to be leverage in every situation? I live and work in the Seattle area and may not get paid the same amount as Amazon employees but I certainly get the freedom and encouragement to pursue ways of furthering the company and their future in revenue generating projects. I tend towards the I will give ample notificationt that I will be leaving and will help in making my own job automated eventually. I'd rather leave a trail of automated services than leave another set of people in the lurch because they took a chance on me. One day when I decide to leave there will be enough Go programmers around to maintain what I have built also. Either my services will run until the integrations change their API or I leave knowing that what I have built will maintain itself if I were to take sabbatical and in that case it is no longer my responsibility. The argument that a single developer is worse than a group of developer is old hat when it's clear that an entire team of developers can up and quit and be a single point of failure either in an individual company with a set of nerds or their outsourced company where all developers decide to unionize or the brain of the team leaves and the remainder of the people may be able to sustain the service or don't have the capacity to. Third party services are just as susceptible to these forces but fear should not be a driving factor to hinder the furtherance of your business.
Hmm, so 99% of the value you create is being skimmed off by the company's shareholders and management? Have you thought about trying to renegotiate to a more equitable split, like 10%/90% or 50%/50% instead of 1%/99%? Or is that impossible because you're in a very weak bargaining position, like a migrant cannery worker?
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%.
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%.
I would argue that if I went to work for the ERP company themselves that my "bargaining" power would actually decrease due to the revenues that they are garnering compared to the company that utilizes the ERP itself. It also assumes I am unhappy with such an outcome that my work is worth 100x my salary and somehow that in itself is reason enough to ask for more. I have ideas that I share with no one that are worth much more and one day soon I will build them myself. Along the way I will have made good contacts in business and investor potential all while not rocking the boat all of the time. I could be completely wrong and would love argument against without down-voting to convince me and potentially others that this in fact is the wrong way to think about things.
I don't think it's a wrong way to think about things. Multiple ways of thinking about things are valid.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
The US salaries force you to go in more competitive markets though and use your engineers better, because your costs are higher. Salaries in France have been 1/3 of US salaries forever, and yet people don't outsource to French engineers, more like French engineers move to the US.
I’ve hired French engineers in France and they’ve done great work. Hard workers too.
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.
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.
Haha, modern employment law :D You'd cause hilarity if you used that expression anywhere in the Scandinavian public discourse, or at least the Norwegian. You'd get tomatoes thrown at you and no one would listen to a single word.
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.
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.
What I mean by that is how worker protection laws from the Industrial Age and which apply to hourly wage employees are applied to professional workers that have autonomy and other attributes that make them very different from hourly workers.
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.
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.
The legal protections on hourly workers aren't enforced in the US or are skirted around by making hourly employees contractors. Professionals would like some of the protections but only if they are actually enforced.
The law defines what a contractor is vs employee. However it can be ambiguous in some cases, especially modern “gig employee” work. Existing boxes don’t fit well. We need new law for this class of worker that wants freedom to choose hours, platforms (like a contractor) but has employer set rates and tasks (like an employee) where there are certain protections beyond a 1099 but also allow these businesses to work, as well as the workers having freedom.
If you outsourced to French engineers you would have to accommodate all of their rights and work styles which don’t exist so much in “developing economies”. A French engineer probably would not be online at 6am and 11pm on the same day to attend meetings and solve problems for their American managers. Eastern European, African, or SE Asian engineers would though.
>It's just not sustainable
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.
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.
>It's just not sustainable anymore for most tech companies.
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.
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.
I mean, if you were CEO, would you choose to reduce profit when you have investors on your back or want to grow staff quickly? Outside of VC driven cash cows or big tech, there's not that much money to go around at the bottom.
I think you really mean that in your experience there's not that much cash that makes it to the bottom... more cash COULD filter down if the corporation was run that way. Most corporations aren't.
>>It was obvious it will happen with remote work.
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....
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....
The truth is that most software isn’t all that special. For the average business that can accelerate their processes with CRUD apps you don’t need to do much in the name of bespoke work. I can have a standard run of the mill CRUD app up in like a week or maybe if sufficiently complex a month or so - with proper tests. That’s the kind of work I’m seeing outsourced in droves typically.
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
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
While simple CRUD apps are not technically challenging; the hard part of doing these is figuring out the specs and communicating with the client. I can see how this can go wrong with offshore clients (time difference, cultural difference, language difference, only remote). There could be a market for local agencies outsourcing tech work (and even that has to be done carefully). But clients directly outsourcing to off-shore agencies, that spell trouble.
A company I worked for struggled for years trying to find the right CRUD system.
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.
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.
That is not what I mean. I am talking about well…when they are generic applications that don’t require bespoke work to be done. Maybe HN is the wrong crowd for this as I think most of us work in more specialized capacity. There is a lot of software out there however being written that is say, wiring power BI applications with predefined requirements, or collecting information via surveys that need to be tied to a CMS. Stuff I’ve seen work pretty well when contracted assuming the person overseeing the venture was competent of course.
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
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
>There’s a global talent shortage for experienced people in software engineering
No, there's not. There's a shortage of cheap experienced software engineers in the US.
No, there's not. There's a shortage of cheap experienced software engineers in the US.
Reminder, every “talent shortage” is actually a wage shortage. Double those salaries and you’ll find plenty of talent.
High wages do not manufacture talent. Spending more money won't allow every soccer team in the world to have a Lionel Messi on squad. There are a finite supply of most skill sets, which can be well below the total demand for those skill sets.
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.
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.
What are these software engineering skillsets that are paying over $1,000,000? There are people who are technically ICs making that, but at that salary its mostly down to politics not technical skill, and they are ICs in name only.
>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.
>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.
A skillset I am familiar with that can pay extremely well is the design of complex systems software from first principles. Most software companies don't have this skillset on their payroll, and honestly most companies don't need it. Companies that do need it really need it though, and they can often directly attribute many millions of dollars to the work, so the exceptional compensation seems reasonable, demand greatly outstripping supply notwithstanding.
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.
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.
That speciality actually sounds extremely interesting. Is this the kind of thing that companies bring in a consultant for, or are these full time positions?
I’d be very interested to hear more. Do you have a blog, or can you point me to any relevantly communities?
I’d be very interested to hear more. Do you have a blog, or can you point me to any relevantly communities?
While, generally, that is a good solution, I think this is not true in this instance. Realistically speaking, SW people are paid very well relative to the average population. And you can't really just mint them on demand. Time to bring up to a SW dev is long. Since the pay is so high, I think most people who had the ability and interest are in SW already. So the supply is pretty much fixed. What would increasing pay do? Just heat up the market. They probably won't get more manpower in the market, but just poach from eachoter. Great for devs, bad for companies(stock holders? CEO? I don't know, modern companies are so nebulous and diffuse, I don't even know who is to gain from them) bottom line.
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.
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.
Yeah at this point, swe are more key to bringing in the future efficiency advancements per person than doctors or lawyers, I remember doctors making multiple hundreds of thousands a year decades ago, with surgeons into the millions. It seems reasonable that swe salaries surpass that as software eats everything and our ability to disseminate engineering Skill stagnate.
Not neccessarily. Say there's 3 million competent senior software engineers in the US, and 75% of them are already working as senior SWEs (the remaining 25% are in early retirement or have switched professions). The best that doubling wages in short term can accomplish is makes those 25% of people move back to the profession.
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.
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.
Believe me you start paying those guys 800k a year they’ll wait a few more years before retiring.
That was part of my point...
This is not actually entirely true (although I've had similar sentiments in the past).
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.
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.
At the margins.
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.
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 short term, paying more will pull doctors out of retirement/semi-retirement, and delay retirement for existing doctors.
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.
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.
I wonder if the reverse is also true, or if we're about to see white collar wages in the US get crushed.
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.
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.
To be honest, I think if most HN-type people want to be worried about threats to their salaries, the heartland is where to worry about. Making 60k/yr with a 4yr CS degree is extremely normal and it's a bit odd because you start high (for the region, I mean) but then the salary for an engineer with 25 years of experience (??) is only 150k.
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.
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.
> Also worth noting, on the topic of culture, that while the heartland votes red, it's mostly just because of how the counties work.
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.
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.
Quite a few confederate flags still fly in relatively urban/suburban Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. So not quite as liberal as you think.
>I wonder if we're about to see protectionism expand from blue collar politics into white collar politics.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I worked as a software developer in one company in Brazil and in three American companies. The skill gap was non-existent. I could see the same level of talent in both places.
What kind of companies in Brazil though? I feel like the level of brazilian engineers outside high growth tech companies is very low. Most of them will literally fail "Fizz-Buzz" style coding tests. Good devs are either making a very good salary in Brazil (30-50k USD) or 2-3X that working remotely for an American company
If you're a good engineer in Latin America you're not settling for less money than your first-world counterparts.
Argentina and Brazil's engineering talent is _outstanding_, and these people are not settling for mediocre companies or mediocre salaries.
Argentina and Brazil's engineering talent is _outstanding_, and these people are not settling for mediocre companies or mediocre salaries.
Exactly. The key is being a great engineer, and there are great engineers everywhere. I guess my point is that at least anecdotally, average engineers in Latin America are notably beyond average engineers in Europe and North America.
IMO I really want tech companies to start hiring in latin america more just for time zone reasons. If India & China was in south america a lot of the pain of having offices from those regions would go away.
I've even done several hiring intensives for people from there 3 or 4 years ago.
I've even done several hiring intensives for people from there 3 or 4 years ago.
As someone who works on west coast time, it’s easy for me to forget that Latin America is largely east of the continental US. Not an issue for remote work, but something that caught me off guard when I started working with people living in that continent.
Yes that is true, I even worked in brazil with a west coast team for a couple weeks. But it's wayyyyyyyyy better than europe, india or china time zones.
The worst is countries that do not share a Monday-Friday working week. MENA tends to be Sunday-Thurs, so in combination with the time zone it means you can only really do Mon-Wed meetings US time.
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?
There are some sites for remote work that allows you to select countries and regions (like WeWorkRemotely), for Brazil some GitHubs that Brazilian look, like (https://github.com/DyegoCosta/trabalhando-remoto#empregos) that are in Portuguese, might have for other countries as well.
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.
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.
I'm working for a local company making ARS800,000 (almost USD 4,000) a month. I think I'm the most experienced senior, with a lot of business knowledge as I worked in the industry (Electronics Manufacturing) for almost 20 years. I not only code, but also make most of the architectural decisions.
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
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
Try https://torre.co they are specialized in hiring LA devs for American companies
https://www.revelo.io/
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.
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.
Search for unicorn startups in Brazil (there aren’t that much) and look for devs from those places on LinkedIn. The tech talent is usually good.
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.
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.
Consider https://bluecoding.com, on their blog they have an article for each Latin American country that explains what to expect from Latam developers (english level, salary ranges, most used tech stack).
There are a few agencies nowadays that are providing these services. You can also find people on LinkedIn (search for people who are working in fast growing tech companies or have graduated from top colleges)
There are lot of HN members from Argentina & Brasil.
There are plenty of offers from LA in "AskHN Who wants to be hired". That must be the easier way to find devs from our continent.
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.
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.
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.
Please describe numbers. Your "2x base offer" can still probably be very small. Example: is 2x +140K ?
yeah, its from £35k to £70k, nothing that breathtaking, but significant for me
That is great! Latin american are still suspiciously uncommon in tech so there is definitely a neglected talent pool.
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...).
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 would love if more people would see it this way. If the discrimination is so strong they should found a company, hire all the discriminated people and profit.
There was a HN submission awhile back about a Dev in Japan who did this very thing. Hiring people such as college dropouts, or older women, who have higher expectations of being stay at home moms in Japan.
If your hypothesis was true then we'd see all the DEI initiatives and blatantly illegal diversity platforms like Canvas [1] have paid off by now. But that isn't the case.
[1]: https://www.canvas.com/
[1]: https://www.canvas.com/
Yes, that's the "in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists" part.
I mean, Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is that if no companies have shown competitive advantage from DEI despite massive investment in DEI initiatives that DEI doesn't work.
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.
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.
That's a good point. A think where it fail is that some candidates are not applying to classical channels (such as latin american) so recruters are not seing them.
I’ve been doing that for 7 years.
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)
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)
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There'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.
There's a very inspiring interview with the co-founder on the Changelog podcast. Highly recommended!
Changelog Master Feed: Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition (Founders Talk #78) https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78
Changelog Master Feed: Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition (Founders Talk #78) https://changelog.com/founderstalk/78
Eugenio is super cool, got to meet him in person. Check out his blog https://eugeniopace.org/
Is anyone here concerned about an eventual "great salary reset" driven by remote work? Companies don'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'll get Chilean software engineers to do the work, and avg salaries go down even more.
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.
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 think it will vary based on where you are in the talent pool. Tech talent distribution is tri-modal [0]. The demand for the kind of people who can comfortably be part of the rightmost peak (and even moreso, its right tail) is increasing rapidly. As tech gets better the leverage high performance individuals have gets bigger, not smaller.
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...
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...
I feel like that article just affirmed my position though. An Uber job that would've been $400k in SF is now $250k in NL. You might think "Wow Group 3 is growing, good for us workers," but the absolute peak of Group 3 is falling.
Yeah, as the other reply said, that 400k L5a (Senior I) Uber job in SF is now paying 580k first year & ~520k/year annualized over 4 years (increased stock grants, large sign-on bonuses, front-loaded vesting). Amazon increased the top of their mid-level payband by ~100k and the top of their senior payband by ~200k. 500k/year is the new "target" senior comp at FAANG & co (where previously 350-400k was what you were looking for). The international numbers are playing catch-up but it's not really slowing things down very much in the US.
Top SF pay is increasing faster than 5 years ago, not slower. The same appears to be true in NL. My interpretation is that NL group 3 salaries are going towards SF but are kept lower by the lack of a local middle market and the various difficulties pulling in devs from a smaller country in a different time zone from most big players.
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Sell that million dollar Bay Are house and move somewhere better but less expensive. Don't worry.
In the 90's they said "learn the code" when globalization costs people their jobs I thought that response about ignorant...
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
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
While having more supply will definitely lower rates, I think there has been a lot of pushback on lowering salaries for people who decide to move to lower col areas. Enough pushback that I have heard of several big companies reversing that policy.
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'd just act as an HR/recruiting/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.
My company uses Eastern European contractors for certain projects as "staff augmentation". Overall, I would say our experience is positive. There are indeed many experienced devs who do great work. But it does have some drawbacks:
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.
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.
Somewhat unrelated but just a side comment, many Ukrainian folks are really trying to move away from the spelling of Kiev as you did, instead they prefer Kyiv (I was corrected several times for this by Ukrainian friends/colleagues when I got to the region so just thought I'd share).
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...
Noted. Thank you!
1) Absolutely - I have been working for the US companies as an FTE (remotely, but C2C, essentially a contractor), and sometimes the hours do make an issue. It's a 9 hour difference with the West Coast for me, but Central / Eastern works well, if the expectations are properly set.
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.
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.
It's a bit of a confusing niche you're trying to fill. Outsourcing firms are generally providing the HR/recruiting/legal role as their specialty. That they wouldn't want to provide another company a cut when they can do this just fine themselves is unsurprising.
True, it's a hard niche to fill, and yup, slightly confusing even. We'd aim for development companies within the US that have some "outsourcing" presence around the world, but have not tapped into Eastern Europe yet. What we're really looking to do is help developers get connected to the US companies and get paid better and not be looked at as contractors, but FTE with benefits.
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
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
I've done something like this. It worked well with the caveat that even when working as FTEs most Eastern European devs still preferred to work like contractors, e.g. "tell me exactly what to build and I'll build it". It worked best when pairing a senior engineer in the US or Western Europe with a team of 2-3 devs in Eastern Europe.
True and fair point! I have been trying to change that mindset for a while. One major thing I believe is the uncertainty of contracting - they never know when they may not be needed again. However, if an EE dev can align himself with the company and has a senior dev / manager above him who can help him make that transition - I think they'd make a great team.
I know the experience varies, but I've seen nothing but trouble from hiring devs from EE.
It could be trouble hiring remote workers anywhere if no due dilligence is done properly. I worked with both EE and Indians and it was okay. Folks did their job decently, they were paid less (but also didn’t have to take all the bullshit open office, noise and fractal like work hours interrupted by interminable meetings.
Absolutely - every experience matters. In Southeastern Europe - you get what you pay for. We would definitely not try to hire anyone with less than 5 years of experience, thoroughly vetted before even talking to the US companies and/or submitting a resume.
Eastern European here. This has been happening for a while. I haven'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've left my last 'real' job (except for that 6 months mentioned before) I either worked for US or Western European companies or my own startups.
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.
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.
No statistics or useful data. Only a couple stories with some information about the topic.
I've worked with partners in Colomba, Costa Rica, Argentina. There'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's been said, most applications aren't that special and shouldn'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 "improved" 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'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'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.
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.
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.
Latin American here. In my last year of college, I got a pretty decently-paid job at a local IT/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.
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.
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.
Latin America dreads looming expansion of Amazon.
>“An American company was offering him $15,000 per month to work for them,” Campos told Rest of World. “We cannot compete with that.”
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...
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...
You are underpaid.
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
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
It's not just Latin America. Most of my acquaintances here in Western Europe are getting remote jobs at American companies.
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.
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.
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'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?
> 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?
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.
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.
Better the devil you know. Many companies like to hire people that worked at other big tech companies before instead of a small company that might be totally different.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30073727
Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.
Interesting decision on remove “pillaging” from title.
Not just hiring, I've been asked to move there last year. It's the new "outsource to india"
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Wheres a good place to find "DevOps"/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?
You can try and directly approach people from LATAM. Find workers from great local tech companies and send them messages through LinkedIn
I knew this was the reason that everybody is asking for fluent English on every position
Rekushi(3)
People underestimate cultural difference and even pretend they don't exist.
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.
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.
> This becomes an even bigger problem when dealing with other cultures.
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
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
Having worked with people in remote latin american offices, the cultural gap isn't as extensive than the other ones actually. The barrier is purely a lack of numbers in this case.
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.
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.
Is diversity and inclusion addressing this?
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.
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.
Hiring from around the globe is tautologically increasing diversity.
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.