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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 tale

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-to-navigate-a-heated-job-market/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-t... [2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-market https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hi...

atlasunshrugged 5y ago
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.
- csomar 5y ago
  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.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Shouldn't mediocre be generally acceptable? It seems unreal to expect the majority to be above average.
    - csomar 5y ago
      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.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        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.
        csomar 5y ago
        > 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.
        giantg2 5y ago
        I'm not worth anything.
    - RealityVoid 5y ago
      My experience is mediocre is insufficient in SW preojects. You NEED some good technical pillars, else it will all be shit.
tinyhouse 5y ago
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.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >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.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  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.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    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.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    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.
devwastaken 5y ago
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.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  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).
- jorblumesea 5y ago
  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.
- thaumaturgy 5y ago
  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.
  - pc86 5y ago
    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.
Accujack 5y ago
>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_wizard 5y ago
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
- csomar 5y ago
  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.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    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.
jimbob45 5y ago
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.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  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.
  - elforce002 5y ago
    Preach!
faangiq 5y ago
Reminder, every “talent shortage” is actually a wage shortage. Double those salaries and you’ll find plenty of talent.
- scsilver 5y ago
  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.
- mooreds 5y ago
  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.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  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.
  - faangiq 5y ago
    Believe me you start paying those guys 800k a year they’ll wait a few more years before retiring.

atlasunshrugged 5y ago

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.

csomar 5y ago
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.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Shouldn't mediocre be generally acceptable? It seems unreal to expect the majority to be above average.
  - csomar 5y ago
    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.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      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.
      - csomar 5y ago
        > 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.
        giantg2 5y ago
        I'm not worth anything.
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    My experience is mediocre is insufficient in SW preojects. You NEED some good technical pillars, else it will all be shit.

tinyhouse 5y ago

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.

Clubber 5y ago
>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.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
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.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  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.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  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.

devwastaken 5y ago

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.

pantalaimon 5y ago
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).
jorblumesea 5y ago
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.
thaumaturgy 5y ago
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.
- pc86 5y ago
  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.

Accujack 5y ago

>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_wizard 5y ago

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

csomar 5y ago
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.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  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.

jimbob45 5y ago

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.

reaperducer 5y ago
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.
- elforce002 5y ago
  Preach!

faangiq 5y ago

Reminder, every “talent shortage” is actually a wage shortage. Double those salaries and you’ll find plenty of talent.

scsilver 5y ago
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.
mooreds 5y ago
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.
burntoutfire 5y ago
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.
- faangiq 5y ago
  Believe me you start paying those guys 800k a year they’ll wait a few more years before retiring.