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If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? If your answer is “time zones”, then why not Bogota? Or

If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? If your answer is “time zones”, then why not Bogota? Or Buenos Aries? It may seem fun and flexible now, but the acceptance of fully-remote work will lead to jobs being hired globally, at lower cost to the company than hiring domestically. And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost.

CheezeIt 5y ago
You’re vastly overestimating the quantity of high talent internationally. Take a look at the proportion of Colombia’s students that can answer these math problems: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/ https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/ For example, 25% of Americans could solve problem 4, and 39% of Canadians, but only 2% of Colombians. (But 8% of Chileans, 15% of Serbians, 21% of Croatians.) Problem 5 is USA 9% to Colombia ~0% (Chile 2%). Problem 6, Taiwan is at 18%, USA 2%. Colombia’s IMO team, drawn from its 50 million people, also gets trounced by Mongolia, population 6 million. And Mongolia isn’t just poor and polluted, half of that 6 million are horses. Only 3.3 million Mongolians are human. Taking the 25% vs. 2% comparison, we could say Colombia’s quality-weighted population is effectively 50 million divided by 12.5, so it’s effectively a 4 million person country, measured in Americans.
- abraxas 5y ago
  China is scoring very well and has a population that trounces all of the western world
- reidjs 5y ago
  Do you think math ability is the most important metric to hire by? I guess it’s correlated to intelligence but I’m not sure if many businesses are looking for intelligence, unfortunately.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    The context was software developers, so yes, that’s what’s relevant. The problems 1 through 5 are basic word problems and if you can’t reliably figure those out at 15, you aren’t going to be any good at software development. (I think, for problem 6, given a dysfunctional education system, you could excuse ignorance of what “average speed” means.) And businesses are looking for intelligence in other roles, too. That’s what gives you an advantage. Especially basic stuff like, being able to answer what is the smallest number in a chart.
    - ulucs 5y ago
      A dysfunctional education system does much worse than failing to teach what average speed means. I seriously, seriously doubt the reasoning "Colombians can't math" is accurate, and don't believe the causes reliably imply "Don't hire Colombians for dev roles"
  - akomtu 5y ago
    For software devs? Yeah, absolutely. We aren't talking about cleaning crews here.
    - nsonha 5y ago
      if that was true FAANG would have been hiring with math questions. In reality, by and large, math skills are not tested for software engineers, with the exeption of trading and such. It is relevant only to the degree of whether or not you can do high-school maths, and the assumption is anyone who can write code can.
      - upgrejd 5y ago
        But those questions on a PISA test Are below high school level maths. It's basic math.
        nsonha 5y ago
        look keep pushing for this nonsense, nobody cares, I doubt that a single person who can't do math read this site, nor apply for a dev job.
- addicted 5y ago
  If 25% of Americans can solve a problem, you only need 2.5% of the rest of the world to be able solve that problem to have double the absolute number of non Americans vs Americans who can solve that problem. You might need maybe 5% of the non US/non EU countries if we also exclude the EU countries, to get double the absolute number of non Americans who can solve it.
- addicted 5y ago
  Also, that test is almost entirely culturally driven. The kind of problem is far more common in North America with its standardized testing driven education, than pretty much anywhere else in the world. I suspect if you asked someone to perform long division, or adding large numbers with decimals and carry overs by hand, instead, the non US countries would perform far better than Americans, who may not even have been taught how to do that.
  - hnfong 5y ago
    Not sure whether you're looking at the same stats, but Asian countries/cities seem to have the best scores...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
akomtu 5y ago
Three reasons: timezones, language barrier and legal barrier. First two are clear. As for the last one, if you do anything remotely important and sensitive to your business, you don't want a dude from Bogota to have access to your project. Edit. I should add that if your project really matters, the dude from Bogota will be a spy or a blackhat with nearly complete certainty. He will be well spoken, likeable, presentable, competent, he will even appear to believe in your company values and will ask for a very moderate salary. And you will brag about how you've got such a superstar for 10% of going payrate here, except that one day he'll stop responding to emails after having collected all the info he needed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
void_mint 5y ago
> If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. > And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost. Again in theory, yes. In practice, not usually.
- sneak 5y ago
  > In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. There are talented and smart people in every country. There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. This really seems like simple racism to me.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - void_mint 5y ago
    > There are talented and smart people in every country. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > This really seems like simple racism to me. This is speaking from lots of experiencing working with and managing outsourced dev labor. I would say that your take seems intellectually lazy to me. Hiring is insanely hard, and adding timezones and language/culture hurdles only makes it harder.
    - addicted 5y ago
      The problem is that your experience is based on a pre pandemic WFH experience. In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first.
      - bluefirebrand 5y ago
        > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. > That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first This assumption is based on the idea that outsourced teams were the second class teams because they were remote. They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced.
atatatat 5y ago
The average developer in country A isn't always as talented as the average developer in country B. Always outliers, but environment and opportunity fuckin matter. and customer service positions in phone banks, it'll never be 1:1 due to colloquial lack of familiarity with non country A dialects.
fourseventy 5y ago
Language barrier, time zone difference, these are real things
commandlinefan 5y ago
> why not Bogota? Or Buenos Aries? Language, for one - although there are fluent English speakers in Colombia and Argentina, there are far fewer there than in the US.
thomaskcr 5y ago
We've been hiring in Panama and its not cheaper really at the end of the day but there's a lot more people to hire. I might do 10 interviews for a position there and find someone vs over 50 in the US and not find anyone. In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal. So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.

CheezeIt 5y ago

You’re vastly overestimating the quantity of high talent internationally. Take a look at the proportion of Colombia’s students that can answer these math problems: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/ https://www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/form/ For example, 25% of Americans could solve problem 4, and 39% of Canadians, but only 2% of Colombians. (But 8% of Chileans, 15% of Serbians, 21% of Croatians.) Problem 5 is USA 9% to Colombia ~0% (Chile 2%). Problem 6, Taiwan is at 18%, USA 2%. Colombia’s IMO team, drawn from its 50 million people, also gets trounced by Mongolia, population 6 million. And Mongolia isn’t just poor and polluted, half of that 6 million are horses. Only 3.3 million Mongolians are human. Taking the 25% vs. 2% comparison, we could say Colombia’s quality-weighted population is effectively 50 million divided by 12.5, so it’s effectively a 4 million person country, measured in Americans.

abraxas 5y ago
China is scoring very well and has a population that trounces all of the western world
reidjs 5y ago
Do you think math ability is the most important metric to hire by? I guess it’s correlated to intelligence but I’m not sure if many businesses are looking for intelligence, unfortunately.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  The context was software developers, so yes, that’s what’s relevant. The problems 1 through 5 are basic word problems and if you can’t reliably figure those out at 15, you aren’t going to be any good at software development. (I think, for problem 6, given a dysfunctional education system, you could excuse ignorance of what “average speed” means.) And businesses are looking for intelligence in other roles, too. That’s what gives you an advantage. Especially basic stuff like, being able to answer what is the smallest number in a chart.
  - ulucs 5y ago
    A dysfunctional education system does much worse than failing to teach what average speed means. I seriously, seriously doubt the reasoning "Colombians can't math" is accurate, and don't believe the causes reliably imply "Don't hire Colombians for dev roles"
- akomtu 5y ago
  For software devs? Yeah, absolutely. We aren't talking about cleaning crews here.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    if that was true FAANG would have been hiring with math questions. In reality, by and large, math skills are not tested for software engineers, with the exeption of trading and such. It is relevant only to the degree of whether or not you can do high-school maths, and the assumption is anyone who can write code can.
    - upgrejd 5y ago
      But those questions on a PISA test Are below high school level maths. It's basic math.
      - nsonha 5y ago
        look keep pushing for this nonsense, nobody cares, I doubt that a single person who can't do math read this site, nor apply for a dev job.
addicted 5y ago
If 25% of Americans can solve a problem, you only need 2.5% of the rest of the world to be able solve that problem to have double the absolute number of non Americans vs Americans who can solve that problem. You might need maybe 5% of the non US/non EU countries if we also exclude the EU countries, to get double the absolute number of non Americans who can solve it.
addicted 5y ago
Also, that test is almost entirely culturally driven. The kind of problem is far more common in North America with its standardized testing driven education, than pretty much anywhere else in the world. I suspect if you asked someone to perform long division, or adding large numbers with decimals and carry overs by hand, instead, the non US countries would perform far better than Americans, who may not even have been taught how to do that.
- hnfong 5y ago
  Not sure whether you're looking at the same stats, but Asian countries/cities seem to have the best scores...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

akomtu 5y ago

Three reasons: timezones, language barrier and legal barrier. First two are clear. As for the last one, if you do anything remotely important and sensitive to your business, you don't want a dude from Bogota to have access to your project. Edit. I should add that if your project really matters, the dude from Bogota will be a spy or a blackhat with nearly complete certainty. He will be well spoken, likeable, presentable, competent, he will even appear to believe in your company values and will ask for a very moderate salary. And you will brag about how you've got such a superstar for 10% of going payrate here, except that one day he'll stop responding to emails after having collected all the info he needed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

void_mint 5y ago

> If your job in SFO can be done from Sacramento or Portland, why can’t it be done from Manila? Or Warsaw? In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. > And don’t fool yourself, that developer in Colombia is just as talented but can work for half the cost. Again in theory, yes. In practice, not usually.

sneak 5y ago
> In theory, nothing. In practice, a dramatic reduction in quality. There are talented and smart people in every country. There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. This really seems like simple racism to me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- void_mint 5y ago
  > There are talented and smart people in every country. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > There are also tons of low quality, low experience, cheap devs in the US, just like the countries you seem to be maligning. Yep. Nowhere did I dispute this. > This really seems like simple racism to me. This is speaking from lots of experiencing working with and managing outsourced dev labor. I would say that your take seems intellectually lazy to me. Hiring is insanely hard, and adding timezones and language/culture hurdles only makes it harder.
  - addicted 5y ago
    The problem is that your experience is based on a pre pandemic WFH experience. In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      > In the past the outsourced teams were clearly second class teams behind the primary local teams. > That won’t be the case if the entire company is remote first This assumption is based on the idea that outsourced teams were the second class teams because they were remote. They weren't. They were second class teams because they were outsourced.

atatatat 5y ago

The average developer in country A isn't always as talented as the average developer in country B. Always outliers, but environment and opportunity fuckin matter. and customer service positions in phone banks, it'll never be 1:1 due to colloquial lack of familiarity with non country A dialects.

fourseventy 5y ago

Language barrier, time zone difference, these are real things

commandlinefan 5y ago

> why not Bogota? Or Buenos Aries? Language, for one - although there are fluent English speakers in Colombia and Argentina, there are far fewer there than in the US.

thomaskcr 5y ago

We've been hiring in Panama and its not cheaper really at the end of the day but there's a lot more people to hire. I might do 10 interviews for a position there and find someone vs over 50 in the US and not find anyone. In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal. So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.