Also: I'd like to ask you a few questions on Latam remote work. My email is in my About if you have the time!
It’s always disheartening to me though that it’s just so easy for people to justify undercutting labor in just a few swift sentences like this, especially because the nuances of culture are very different, for one, and for two, there are downsides to this form of recruitment that never gets acknowledged from issues with time zones to acceptable quality standards and other things.
Maybe I’m just old, but it feels almost heartless to be compared by the numbers that someone should just “hire in Latin American because they have less leverage”.
Just treat your employees well. No you don’t need to hire in traditionally geographical Silicon Valley areas every time or by default, but you don’t have to go all the way to latam either.
I hope people in other areas of the world wise up to this and ask for 1st rate salaries and benefits
I can't believe HN zeitgeist cannot understand this.
Why would I hire a US employee for twice the cost when I can hire someone 95% as good remotely in a low cost area of the world and actually get an employee that sticks around for a decade vs. a year?
It's honestly not even really a decision at this point if you have the management infrastructure in place.
This is fantasy.
It's not interesting to discuss outliers. Millions are being made playing this talent/wage arbitrage as we speak. The top 1% of engineers is not interesting to discuss, and certainly is not representative of the average FAANG employee (or salary).
Edit: Direct personal experience during my entire working career. Are there bubbles of super-talent completely out of my reach for such a pleb? Absolutely. But those folks are not interesting to the vast majority of companies needing basic but competent IT talent. Many folks here seem to be under the impression they are in that pool. Time will tell.
I'm not saying there aren't some talented developers working for cheap, but most of the time you get what you pay for.
The problem with “off shoring” is that’s how it is treated.
Remote work, where people become part of your team and work with everyone else is quite different and avoids the failure cases you have likely seen.
It’s hardly controversial to say that a huge chunk of Silicon Valley talent is from migrants. So clearly the training overseas is up to scratch.
Thank you. I believe this is the point everyone is missing.
And this is new. Giant companies never did this sort of thing really. It was always the low effort outsourcing approaches I was seeing in these markets.
Today I'm now competing with IBM and the ilk in these markets for direct employees. The tides are shifting extremely rapidly and I don't think many in the US even understand what has happened underneath them in the past few years.
LOL. That's totally out of touch. It is not about them "wising up". There are quite lots of different dynamics here at play. It is a complex and competitive market.
I'm sure all the latin american developers are super hyped about this advice not to hire them.
It’s meant as a counter ti the idea of hiring them just because they’re “cheaper”
You acknowledge you are a cofounder of your company, therefore you and your cofounder named you as CTO (as opposed to an existing company where somebody was promoted or hired into the position by someone else). I'm just curious who your "peer group" is, the ones you believe "don't know how to manage remote teams" and have "loneliness issues" -- other self-proclaimed CTOs? Or a wider group of people? And what experience do you have that makes you so much of an expert? What are the long-term consequences of an engineering team that you assembled at a discount?
Disagree. Quality engineers will ask for their worth regardless of location.
Also I think indexing on "less likely to job hop or negotiate salary" is short-sighted thinking. You're asking people to do a complex job where the key skill is critical thinking and self determination. Those skills go hand in hand with people willing to demand their worth from you. Sure, save a little bit of money now. But you're going to be building a brittle, disposable product with a brittle, disposable team for what ultimately will amount to a brittle, disposable company.
You might laugh, but for some being a builder of a place that treats people well while also being financially successful is important. In any event, it’s a interesting challenge that it seems few care to undertake.
Like I said in a sibling post, the best we can do is: first, don't give our talent or time to these people. Second, start our own companies built on treating human beings with respect.
To give you an idea, Google Warsaw pays just a touch above 100k to local senior engineers.
What data do you have to back this up? Top 1% engineers who have all the options? sure.
80% engineers? You will be paying double local market rates already and you will find you can trivially out-talent for the same budget.
Will this change over time? Sure. But reality on the ground is you can hire someone of equivalent talent for half the cost in Europe/LATAM/etc. vs. the US a the moment. In quantity.
For example in India it used to be only outsourcing, but now they are launching their own startups as well, some quite succesful. Slowly the capital will start accumulating there as well. And that is a good thing, for global inequality.
Plenty C level people know this is the eventual outcome. They just also know that the runway is likely to extend beyond their working career because they control most business decisions for the foreseeable future.
They still operate on a relationship basis with ownership/capital while managing the company on a Netflix performance model for everyone else. Those relationships are likely to stay in place until both sides age out of the industry.
I've worked with a number of C level folks hired into companies from low cost regions and they have all been utterly stellar. This is coming, just not for the current generation of senior execs.
The playbook worked for them, but that doesn't mean it worked for the people they were managing, or the company they worked for.
My experience with managers and "the playbook that worked" for the past 50 years is that 80% of it consists of "if the employee is in their seat, and not visibly goofing off, that means they are working at 100% productivity; anything else is stealing from the company."
It's effectively rooted in an assembly-line mindset (where if you weren't at your post, you clearly weren't working, and it was pretty easy to see whether you were working when you were at your post), in addition to treating subordinates like robots with no mental, emotional, or even physical needs while they are at work.
You can find devs in the US for less too. $160k for a senior dev in the Philly region is generous.
The more we collectively push for remote work, the more likely it becomes that our compensation takes a huge nosedive. Engineers in Brazil or El Salvador will LOVE working at even 30% of total FAANG comp (while enjoying fewer worker's rights and fewer benefits), and they are by and large technically competent.
This whole thread has a very "I got mine" vibe to it.
That's really just a veneer for "transactional and performance based"
Whenever I hear a company say that they are like a family, I run. In a family, you don't lay off family members. As a matter-of-fact, if it is a family run business, and there's a business downturn, they will lay off all workers and leave their actual family members working.
In reality, saying it is "family" is just a machiavellian ploy to pretend a business actually cares about the employees, in order to make them loyal to the company, without the loyalty going the other way. I've read so many stories about how owners were always talking about the company being "family" but when push came to shove, they shoved the employee out the door. But like so many companies, all the ones that are shedding employees, they never seem to fire the C-suite, somehow.
As far as culture goes, all companies want to create a culture that is maximal efficiency for the company. That's all the culture is in a corporate world. It's transactional. No company is going to have a culture of 5 hour picnic lunches every day, followed by an hour foot massage for everyone so that only 2 hours of work get done a day. That would be silly. ALL business cultures exist to maximize shareholder investments. To the extent that cultures are different is just a different way of trying to maximize employee output. Nothing is wrong with it, but it actually is transactional. To the extent people talk about "culture" that is really just trying to polish the turd.
I agree with everythinig else you wrote.