Comment by yolovoe
2 days ago
I don't mean to spread FUD, but as an interviewer at a FAANG in the US, I have mostly been interviewing candidates in LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). Same for some of my other coworkers.
It's happening, and happening fast.
2 days ago
I don't mean to spread FUD, but as an interviewer at a FAANG in the US, I have mostly been interviewing candidates in LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). Same for some of my other coworkers.
It's happening, and happening fast.
Many of the founders I know (who started companies in the past 3 years) are primarily hiring in LATAM too.
That's a good point.
I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers.
Just not so great for those of us in the US.
This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH.
Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF.
This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad.
But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore.
And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
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Incidentally 80-90k is pretty normal pay in Europe too. High, even, for southern Europe.
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It's been happening for half a century or so.
The boring reality is that the price of labor roughly reflects the productivity companies typically get. Because if there is ever some clear win in some location, people start hiring there, and things start to balance out again.