7 ms·

Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of

Not the original commenter, but this is the situation in Argentina. I would love to do a remote gig and get 100k a year. I am a programmer with over 20 years of experience and I can program professionally in over 10 different programming languages.

rubicon33 5y ago
It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software. I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.
- momirlan 5y ago
  Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.
- Volrath89 5y ago
  I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k. I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here. There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
  - aurelianito 5y ago
    I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents. There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      Agreed the time zones are killer. If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
    - esel2k 5y ago
      Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.
  - yaitsyaboi 5y ago
    Just curious: what kind of lifestyle does 100k USD get you in Colombia?
    - Volrath89 5y ago
      You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities) You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks
      - lowkj 5y ago
        I would say I live even further than the suburbs (45 minutes from Medellín, one house every acre / 5000 m2) and we just got a second fiber option maxed out at 300mb so that may be changing. As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything. A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here. There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase. Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I agree 100%. Aside from time differences, the biggest problem we have with remote teams in faraway places is communication. We have really sharp folks in our Hyderabad office, but some of them really struggle to communicate clearly, and a poor Zoom connection doesn't help at all. That would be my one piece of advice to someone outside the US who wants some of that sweet, sweet income we have grown accustomed to. Being a good coder is fine, but not really distinctive. Work hard on speaking English as clearly as possible. It absolutely will give you a competitive advantage.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      Buying a decent microphone is also something I'd strongly recommend, especially for people (like me) that have a non-local accent. In addition, high quality audio makes you sound smarter :) https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        Yes, this helps a lot. I bought a Audio-Technica AT2020USB+ for my home office a while back. Now my team says I sound like an NPR host :)
- davedx 5y ago
  This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    So the Dutch government is incentivizing hiring non-Dutch people??!
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      This is not dumb. This is how you kickstart a network and trust.
    - estebank 5y ago
      It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US. https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-matters/highly-skilled-migrants/thirty-percent-ruling/30-percent-ruling-indepth https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-m...
      - azinman2 5y ago
        Oh I see, I thought the GP meant hire elsewhere, like outsourcing. That makes much more sense.
- akiselev 5y ago
  > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era. We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money. I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
  - mech422 5y ago
    I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia... I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.
    - Tarsul 5y ago
      at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...
- moron4hire 5y ago
  I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard. Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't. Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself. Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
- JTbane 5y ago
  Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it. Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
- sidlls 5y ago
  What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Overseas can range from: you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how. Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic. Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.
- theferret 5y ago
  > It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.

rubicon33 5y ago

It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. The second this changes, the bottom drops out of software. I don't know if it will ever happen that big companies begin openly accepting overseas applicants but if/when it does, you can expect that it wont be for 100k. Suddenly when you consider the entire planet, there's no longer a shortage of developers, and the employer has all the power.

momirlan 5y ago
Employers had 20+ years to switch to overseas workers. The percentage of jobs that went east has stabilized, and it's not going to change dramatically.
Volrath89 5y ago
I'm located in Colombia, and all my developers friends/acquaintances that speak English are already working for US companies. Some of them earning 100k+, but most of them earning about 50-70k. I'd say there is not a general unwillingness to hire overseas developers, on the contrary, if more people could speak english in south america US companies would be more than happy to hire even more here. There is a shortage in english speaking developers globally, but not a shortage on companies' interest in hiring anywhere
- aurelianito 5y ago
  I could get a 60k USD a year remote thing but I would be out of the system (I mean, now I am an Argentinian employee with all the rights it entails). For 60k, it is not worth it. For 100k it would be worth to solve all the issues associated with getting money from abroad (maybe make a corporation somewhere?). Anyway, I am listening to 100k+ offers.
- majormajor 5y ago
  South America is an interesting one for a lot of US companies because the timezones line up much better with US-local folks than in any other continents. There are still other substantial collaboration challenges, but if more places move to be truly remote-first, those places will necessarily have solutions for that anyway.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Agreed the time zones are killer. If I start another company I’d really like to hire a competent offshore team in south or Central America but I have a lot of trouble getting there from here. If I wanted to hire a team in Israel, Pakistan or India, I could do it immediately, because I have trusted friends who can hook me up with people that they themselves trust plus or minus some skeeviness that I know how to manage. For south-of-us I have no connections and basically no way to start.
  - esel2k 5y ago
    Agreed. I am a product manager for a startup software acquired from Brazil. Nearly all engineering sit in Brazil (or some squads in India). I am the EU based PM that has to deal with the timezone issues and requirements- do I like it? Not really, but it is existing and the company might hire a an architect or tech lead on europe, the rest will remain outsourced. Generally speaking some of the developpers speak good English and so with Jira and Figma it works.
- yaitsyaboi 5y ago
  Just curious: what kind of lifestyle does 100k USD get you in Colombia?
  - Volrath89 5y ago
    You can live in a flat in the best parts of major cities comfortably, you could hire one or maybe even two FT employees to help you to cook, clean the house, take care of kids, etc. If you don't like the city life, you could also rent a small "mansion" in the suburbs (but then you'd suffer a bit with the internet connection, fiber only goes to major cities) You could dine out at nice restaurants every weekend and travel around by plane every time there is a holiday and stay at 5 star hotels Taking into account the minimum salary here is 300 USD / month and with 50k per year you are already top 1%, 100k gives you an unimaginable level of wealth. You'd earn about the same salary as the president of the country and more than most CEOs from local companies But that would be if you spend all your salary every month which is not so smart, what most of us (bilingual developers) do is continue living a standard middle class life and just invest heavily, I invest more than 50% of my salary, mostly in real state and US stocks
    - lowkj 5y ago
      I would say I live even further than the suburbs (45 minutes from Medellín, one house every acre / 5000 m2) and we just got a second fiber option maxed out at 300mb so that may be changing. As an American who moved to Colombia, I can highly recommend it. That said, there’s a lot of downsides not mentioned here. First off, your foreign earned income and your US credit score mean nothing here. You will not be able to get a loan and if you want to buy property, you’ll be paying cash. I had to pay 8 months of rent into a bank deposited escrow just to rent a fairly cheap house for one year. That also involved (literally) about 6 trips each to a physical notary office and banks). Things that would be unheard of in the US are common place, like constant physical signatures and finger prints to authenticate documents and asking for your national id number in order to do anything and everything. A small empty lot in the nicer parts outside Medellín will be at least $225,000. Not bad and beautiful land but again you’ll have to pay cash for everything. Taxes are very high and you can expect to pay 30% - 80% more for many foreign products (“nicer” cars in particular seem to be ridiculously high priced). Tech product selection is terrible, everything lags way behind or simply isn’t available. Amazon does ship a selection of lighter weight items here but you’ll pay a VAT tax of 20% plus an import tax of 10% on the total including shipping. It usually works out to be a 40% premium. Electric vehicles essentially do not exist unless you want a Twizy. I just had my radiator fan go out on my car and was quoted $900 for the part alone which is available in the States for $200. With shipping and taxes I can order from the US for about $550 but it will take about 2 weeks to get here. There’s a lot of unnecessary friction in daily life, just trying to do “simple” things like an online purchase. Still an amazing place, lots of great things but as someone trying to actually make a long term life here it can definitely be frustrating.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I agree 100%. Aside from time differences, the biggest problem we have with remote teams in faraway places is communication. We have really sharp folks in our Hyderabad office, but some of them really struggle to communicate clearly, and a poor Zoom connection doesn't help at all. That would be my one piece of advice to someone outside the US who wants some of that sweet, sweet income we have grown accustomed to. Being a good coder is fine, but not really distinctive. Work hard on speaking English as clearly as possible. It absolutely will give you a competitive advantage.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    Buying a decent microphone is also something I'd strongly recommend, especially for people (like me) that have a non-local accent. In addition, high quality audio makes you sound smarter :) https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter https://tips.ariyh.com/p/good-sound-quality-smarter
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      Yes, this helps a lot. I bought a Audio-Technica AT2020USB+ for my home office a while back. Now my team says I sound like an NPR host :)
davedx 5y ago
This is absolutely untrue. In The Netherlands the government has a 30% tax rebate for devs who come from elsewhere and it’s leveraged intensely, more than half of the devs I work with at bigger companies here are usually not Dutch.
- azinman2 5y ago
  So the Dutch government is incentivizing hiring non-Dutch people??!
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    This is not dumb. This is how you kickstart a network and trust.
  - estebank 5y ago
    It is incentivizing highly skilled and highly compensated people moving to The Nederlands from beyond 150km from the border by not charging the 30% tax for up to 5 years. This is similar on intent to the O1 visas in the US. https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-matters/highly-skilled-migrants/thirty-percent-ruling/30-percent-ruling-indepth https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/living/take-care-of-official-m...
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Oh I see, I thought the GP meant hire elsewhere, like outsourcing. That makes much more sense.
akiselev 5y ago
> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Because it's been tried before and for the most part it was an abysmal failure. I was just starting out doing some basic web freelancing as a teenager in the 2000s and even I got roped in to clean up an outsourced project after being outbid a year earlier by an overseas firm during the first outsourcing wave. Lots of people on HN have horror stories of cleaning up from that era. We've been here several times before - like literally just this past year of everyone saying "oh but now you have to compete with remote workers everywhere!" Salaries keep rising because software is an arms race. The companies making the most profit will continue to invest in getting the best people and outside of the odd global crisis, the industry will continue to grow as everyone else tries to keep up both in technology and in hiring. All those firms I cleaned up after as a kid are still around today and bigger than ever, yet on this side of the ocean we keep making more and more money. I think we've got at least a century before software hits the diminishing returns that the industrial revolution did. My local lumberyard is still using DOS machines probably made before I was born.
- mech422 5y ago
  I've been thru off-shorting with India, China, Russia... I'm sorta wondering what country would be next. It has to have a large enough labor pool to fill the positions, and still be cheap enough to at least look good on paper..
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    My guess is most likely Africa, though I think somewhere in Central or South America would have a very strong advantage due to the narrower time offset.
  - Tarsul 5y ago
    at least here in Germany the biggest companies like to expand into Eastern Europe (think Slovakia, Hungary, also Russia), where these IT experts help in the German projects. They even get many of those people to learn German! The price pressure doesn't really stop there because while at first Slovakia was the way to go, now Hungary is xx% cheaper.. and so on and so on...
moron4hire 5y ago
I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard. Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't. Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself. Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed.
JTbane 5y ago
Will it happen though? Hiring someone from a foreign country is easy for a temporary contract, but in industry we need to "own the code" and continue to maintain it. Ultimately outsourcing has issues with accountability.
sidlls 5y ago
What makes you think that these companies will pay above-market (local) rates sufficient to overcome other frictions? I think it's more likely they'll look at the local market rates and maybe pay a modest premium--not enough to create a huge draw of local talent looking for remote work, and not enough to make a dent in the labor market dynamics in general.
treeman79 5y ago
Overseas can range from: you are a team of people located all over the world. To Your being off-shored to India as soon as can figure out how. Worked both, and the culture difference and happiness difference is drastic. Even a hint of offshoring will induced panic for many employees/ candidates. Definitely makes hiring and retention hard.
theferret 5y ago
> It is worth noting that software salaries are artificially inflated HEAVILY due to a general unwillingness or lack of interest in hiring overseas developers. Yes that's right; business hates saving money and loves hiring super expensive US talent.