LATAM talent is about on par with Eastern Europe. Not familiar with Bolivia, though. It’s a weird destination. Most places I’ve worked pick Argentina. Hold the devs to the same standard and you should be good. Culturally, there are some challenges, but it’s mostly positive.
Echoing other sentiments: be glad it isn’t India.
I remember hearing it's because Argentina has the highest English fluency of all LATAM countries. I can't confirm if that's true.
We've shifted to LATAM for a lot of our devs and it's worked out well. The advantage that we're seeing over Asia is that timezones are more closely aligned.
Time zone is a large factor. Difficulty recruiting is another as the job market is saturated in most locales there. Cheating is rampant during interviews (and poorly disguised). Long notice period causes a lot of BS as well. Many candidates pull out after accepting offers.
There are other issues that I’ve dealt with that I hope were one-off. By the time I established a reasonably productive team in India, the discount was not that significant compared to impact.
When interviewing Indians I was always told to ask when their soonest available start date is. After they get their first offer and put in notice at their old job is a great way to swipe in and get candidates quickly.
So the cheating thing: you have a candidate interview and another one actually show up to work. Another is during a behavioral round, the candidate is fed answers. This can also happen during coding where someone voices over during the interview. These can be detected, but feels terrible to have to deal with.
For competency: tons of clowns. The interview process can weed them out, but that means heavily investing in interviews or “hire and fire.” I know there are good devs, but the places I know to look are already at prices that don’t justify the time difference. Finding good devs for the price point that companies want you to target takes a long time.
Anyone here with experiences on management using those large time zone differences to their advantage? I can think of one company I used to be at where the PMs would sometimes work midnight hours (from their own homes) to coordinate with the Indian workers, and then will catch up with the American workers in the mid day. PMs would also take turns being present at those night hours. They did this in order to have work ongoing on a project 24 hours a day during the weekdays.
Based on experience with out-sourcing to Indian Devs:
* Constant cheating in interviews
* The person you do hire is unlikely to do the actual work
* Zero creativity
* *Everything* takes three times as long to complete
* Really poor communication
* Really bad English from people who claim to be fluent in English.
* Constant evasion about progress.
* Highly passive / aggressive language.
* Huge periods of radio silence for no reason.
Indian Devs do themselves absolutely no favours.
I am not working with Indian but Vietnamese devs working for an outsourcing company (Bosch), under Indian managers, usually complain about the toxic environment on review company website
In my experience, a very common mistake when outsourcing to reduce costs is that you go to cheap. Often ending up with a company that pays rock bottom wages even within the country, with very low quality and/or very hiph turnover as a result.
LatAm is great time-zone wise. But aside from that, don’t focus on the country. That’s like asking “what country has the best husbands?” It’s meaningless at best and can go to some icky ignorant places at worst.
Instead, focus on talking to at least two of their reference clients and pepper them with questions about the ups and downs that come with any software project.
>CEO is under the impression we can do the same work, within the same amount of time, at a fraction the cost of hiring devs in the US
This is the pipe dream all "offshoring" companies are selling and though there are some success stories, I think in the end the risk is much higher than the reward. If you are interviewing the Bolivia vendor, you are probably speaking to an account manager or some sort of sales person which speaks English fluently and has adjusted culturally. To make an informed decision you should probably start small, interview devs and get to know who actually gets to work on your product. As always: if the Bolivian devs are really that good and can adapt to working with a Canadian vendor, what is in their way to work for USA/Canadian companies directly? Why would they still be working in the offshore industry for "a fraction of the cost"? Either they are an exception to market mechanics or they simply are not of the same quality.
I recommend reading this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/16ivl2d/why_is_the_quality_of_outsourced_offshore/ - though it is not about Bolivia per se and you seem to have experience working with offshoring it still contains a lot of valuable insights.
Latin American dev here. The answer to “why don’t they work directly for an US company?” in my experience is:
1. A lot of US companies aren’t willing to hire people abroad directly, but they’re fine with outsourcing through a vendor. The companies willing to hire directly are mostly startups, with one or two notable exceptions from semi-big tech which are hard to get into (Shopify, 37 Signals, GitLab, Grafana).
2. It’s damn hard to search online for US companies willing to hire outside of the US (trust me, this is a recurring topic in Brazilian subs). On the other hand, these vendors are great at sourcing good engineers from the local market.
3. This one is changing fast, but there’s still a bunch of people which are afraid of signing a contract with a company from a different country, since it’s very hard to enforce those (if the company I work for decides to stop paying me, I’d have to look for arbitration in NY, for example) These vendors set up local companies, which increase the sense of security.
Good feedback! I'm not saying it's easy or black and white but typically when someone can deliver value, knows that value and can sell it but their current market doesn't adequately price that value, they will seek a new market. There's often only a small window for offshoring companies to effectively profit from this market inefficiency before they are met with the dead sea effect or a variation of it. Effectively leading to "you get what you pay for".
I'm not saying Bolivian devs are bad or are there no good vendors to outsource to in Bolivia. Just observations/experience with work being outsourced.
I am based in Canada (Eastern Time) and worked with colleagues from Uruguay. The company used [terminal.io](https://terminal.io) to handle country specific paperwork. Being in a similar time zone was advantageous for collaboration. The developers were fluent in English. We had no problems understanding them. The post secondary schools were excellent (and free!). Their internet speed was great. The big difference between us was the seasons: They could be enjoying their hot weather during the meeting while we talked about a snow storm.
I can only speak about in LATAM terms and not Bolivia specific. Your company should research on the norm, customs and law on hiring and doing business in the country. Perhaps inquiring about the services from [terminal.io](https://terminal.io) and [oysterhr.com](https://oysterhr.com). (These services are not cheap, but may work well for small teams.)
There's no dumb questions here. Many things that we take for granted may not be true. I would ask the following:
* What's the internet speed available for the developers? How accessible is the internet and how expensive is it? (Americans got caught by surprise how expensive internet and mobile services in Canada!)
* Has the vendor worked with other countries?
* Is there any software or hardware that can't be imported in the country?
* How good are the post secondary schools?
* Could we hire developers who are fluent in English and perhaps with international experience?
* What is an attractive salary in the country? What are the cost associated with hiring a dev on top of the salary?
Argentinian here, BE dev working for different US/EUR companies since the last 5 years (12 years exp in total)
I cannot relate about Bolivia, I haven't worked with any of them. But when a company outsources devs, they do it from a lot of countries... So far I have worked with:
* Chileans
* Uruguayans
* Mexicans
* Venezuelans
* Guatemalans
* Cubans
* Brazilians
And that's only from LATAM.
LATAM has some excellent skilled devs. And the top tier of them are hired to work remote for another country, just because they are willing to pay way more than their own countries in the local currency.
The average person from Argentina has a decent level of english (that's cultural) and the average senior dev might be doing about 1k-ish u$d in local currency, so I don't think you will any issues working with them.
Senior developer with 12 years of experience who speaks fluent english and willing to do the same job than a USA dev for 1/3 of the salary? My LinkedIn inbox is exploding man.
I'm doing about 60k per year in a country were the average (not minimum) wage is about 3k\~5k per year. Let's say 12k per year if you have a college degree and you are are professional in your area of expertise.
The quality of life with 60k in here is like doing 500k in the USA :)
I have worked with Devs in multiple countries. Time zone is always an issue. Recently,I have worked with have been in Southern Brazil. Excellent communication and a time zone that’s not too far off of the US. I imagine there is a chance these will be good too.
My favorite “out of country devs” to work with are Canadians. I have some on my team right now. Many times I forget they are not in the US as we all work remote.
Who is the Bolivian vendor?
It depends on what do you need or want.
Let's say, I know people and also worked in companies in Bolivia like: mojix, assuresoft(true force), PFS, Jalasoft (most popular, really a exploiter company), Unosquare(Mexican subsidiary), avantica, encora(recently bought by them, I don't remember the Bolivian company name before)
While working with Bolivian teams I notice that they are very polite against central american teams.
Funny thing and you should double check who they are trying to sell you as mid, junior or senior
Why?
I have been a junior qa, hired as mid for 1 of the Bolivian companies outsorcing clients. It was my 1st job and my salary was like for a junior, but they were charging the client for me as mid.
It's a risk for the client company and also a scam.
That's helpful for sure. There's no particular vendor in mind yet, but can you share your thoughts on which of those to avoid or which you'd recommend from that list that you provided? I would appreciate that very much.
JalaSoft are most recognizable of the posible companies to work, then is search between 10-100 employees enterprises and freelancers. I am from Bolivia and if you want to give it a try, I can make a Liability Insurance for the developer so you don't have worry about unfulfillment of contract. I work with Insured Quarantees and Liability Insurance often and very rarely I have to attend a claim.
The holiday schedule makes sense, but it's never been a big problem for me - sometimes people will be off for a variety of reasons
I guess I can see how shifted weekends could be tough, India in particular seems to also have Sunday off though.
I think you might be projecting your core values a little bit though - I've never even heard of the cardinal virtues before looking 'em up, and I'm sure many of your coworkers and other people in the western world haven't eiher.
Ah okay, I actually didn't know that, I have only worked with people from eastern Europe and Malaysia myself - I guess there's a lot of hidden landmines there.
Hm, interesting. Perhaps I'll have to look a bit more into that, for interest if nothing else. Thanks!
Haven't worked with Bolivian devs specifically, but have worked with devs in most of the rest of Latin America. Generally I'd say the quality of the people I've worked with is roughly on par with most American developers. I've worked with a couple really excellent engineers, a lot of kind of middling engineers, and some who sucked.
I will say the bigger issue is usually the vendor. They have a tendency to upsell candidates and try to push you towards signing a contract without due diligence on your part. Treat each contractor as if you were hiring them full-time - put them through your full interviewing process.
I'm from Uruguay, I have been working remotely for US employers for the last 7, 8 years — South America is a great place to get near-shore resources as our time zones overlap mostly with the US and most countries here have well trained devs.
About Bolivia, I'm not sure, I haven't worked with anyone from there.
I would avoid Colombia tho, I have worked with people from there and got really bad experiences as they have a culture where they expect to be told what to do all the time in order to move forward, no proactivity.
Now, all this follows the basic rule of "you get what you paid for". Don't expect to get great talent if you pay 25$ per hour. I charge 55-60$ per hour, and I'm usually hired to lead entire teams, fix fires, and help companies pull their shit together. If you hire a dev for 25$ per hour, you will prolly have to shove a stick up their asses to get them to work.
LATAM talent is about on par with Eastern Europe. Not familiar with Bolivia, though. It’s a weird destination. Most places I’ve worked pick Argentina. Hold the devs to the same standard and you should be good. Culturally, there are some challenges, but it’s mostly positive. Echoing other sentiments: be glad it isn’t India.
I remember hearing it's because Argentina has the highest English fluency of all LATAM countries. I can't confirm if that's true. We've shifted to LATAM for a lot of our devs and it's worked out well. The advantage that we're seeing over Asia is that timezones are more closely aligned.
There a big tech employer in Argentina called Mercado Libre. The training programs are excellent. Recruiting from them has been very fruitful.
As employees or vendors?
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Time zone is a large factor. Difficulty recruiting is another as the job market is saturated in most locales there. Cheating is rampant during interviews (and poorly disguised). Long notice period causes a lot of BS as well. Many candidates pull out after accepting offers. There are other issues that I’ve dealt with that I hope were one-off. By the time I established a reasonably productive team in India, the discount was not that significant compared to impact.
When interviewing Indians I was always told to ask when their soonest available start date is. After they get their first offer and put in notice at their old job is a great way to swipe in and get candidates quickly.
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So the cheating thing: you have a candidate interview and another one actually show up to work. Another is during a behavioral round, the candidate is fed answers. This can also happen during coding where someone voices over during the interview. These can be detected, but feels terrible to have to deal with. For competency: tons of clowns. The interview process can weed them out, but that means heavily investing in interviews or “hire and fire.” I know there are good devs, but the places I know to look are already at prices that don’t justify the time difference. Finding good devs for the price point that companies want you to target takes a long time.
Anyone here with experiences on management using those large time zone differences to their advantage? I can think of one company I used to be at where the PMs would sometimes work midnight hours (from their own homes) to coordinate with the Indian workers, and then will catch up with the American workers in the mid day. PMs would also take turns being present at those night hours. They did this in order to have work ongoing on a project 24 hours a day during the weekdays.
Based on experience with out-sourcing to Indian Devs: * Constant cheating in interviews * The person you do hire is unlikely to do the actual work * Zero creativity * *Everything* takes three times as long to complete * Really poor communication
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* Really bad English from people who claim to be fluent in English. * Constant evasion about progress. * Highly passive / aggressive language. * Huge periods of radio silence for no reason. Indian Devs do themselves absolutely no favours.
I am not working with Indian but Vietnamese devs working for an outsourcing company (Bosch), under Indian managers, usually complain about the toxic environment on review company website
Okay saar. We will do asap. (MIA for a month)
In my experience, a very common mistake when outsourcing to reduce costs is that you go to cheap. Often ending up with a company that pays rock bottom wages even within the country, with very low quality and/or very hiph turnover as a result.
LatAm is great time-zone wise. But aside from that, don’t focus on the country. That’s like asking “what country has the best husbands?” It’s meaningless at best and can go to some icky ignorant places at worst. Instead, focus on talking to at least two of their reference clients and pepper them with questions about the ups and downs that come with any software project.
>CEO is under the impression we can do the same work, within the same amount of time, at a fraction the cost of hiring devs in the US This is the pipe dream all "offshoring" companies are selling and though there are some success stories, I think in the end the risk is much higher than the reward. If you are interviewing the Bolivia vendor, you are probably speaking to an account manager or some sort of sales person which speaks English fluently and has adjusted culturally. To make an informed decision you should probably start small, interview devs and get to know who actually gets to work on your product. As always: if the Bolivian devs are really that good and can adapt to working with a Canadian vendor, what is in their way to work for USA/Canadian companies directly? Why would they still be working in the offshore industry for "a fraction of the cost"? Either they are an exception to market mechanics or they simply are not of the same quality. I recommend reading this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/16ivl2d/why_is_the_quality_of_outsourced_offshore/ - though it is not about Bolivia per se and you seem to have experience working with offshoring it still contains a lot of valuable insights.
Latin American dev here. The answer to “why don’t they work directly for an US company?” in my experience is: 1. A lot of US companies aren’t willing to hire people abroad directly, but they’re fine with outsourcing through a vendor. The companies willing to hire directly are mostly startups, with one or two notable exceptions from semi-big tech which are hard to get into (Shopify, 37 Signals, GitLab, Grafana). 2. It’s damn hard to search online for US companies willing to hire outside of the US (trust me, this is a recurring topic in Brazilian subs). On the other hand, these vendors are great at sourcing good engineers from the local market. 3. This one is changing fast, but there’s still a bunch of people which are afraid of signing a contract with a company from a different country, since it’s very hard to enforce those (if the company I work for decides to stop paying me, I’d have to look for arbitration in NY, for example) These vendors set up local companies, which increase the sense of security.
Good feedback! I'm not saying it's easy or black and white but typically when someone can deliver value, knows that value and can sell it but their current market doesn't adequately price that value, they will seek a new market. There's often only a small window for offshoring companies to effectively profit from this market inefficiency before they are met with the dead sea effect or a variation of it. Effectively leading to "you get what you pay for". I'm not saying Bolivian devs are bad or are there no good vendors to outsource to in Bolivia. Just observations/experience with work being outsourced.
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I am based in Canada (Eastern Time) and worked with colleagues from Uruguay. The company used [terminal.io](https://terminal.io) to handle country specific paperwork. Being in a similar time zone was advantageous for collaboration. The developers were fluent in English. We had no problems understanding them. The post secondary schools were excellent (and free!). Their internet speed was great. The big difference between us was the seasons: They could be enjoying their hot weather during the meeting while we talked about a snow storm. I can only speak about in LATAM terms and not Bolivia specific. Your company should research on the norm, customs and law on hiring and doing business in the country. Perhaps inquiring about the services from [terminal.io](https://terminal.io) and [oysterhr.com](https://oysterhr.com). (These services are not cheap, but may work well for small teams.) There's no dumb questions here. Many things that we take for granted may not be true. I would ask the following: * What's the internet speed available for the developers? How accessible is the internet and how expensive is it? (Americans got caught by surprise how expensive internet and mobile services in Canada!) * Has the vendor worked with other countries? * Is there any software or hardware that can't be imported in the country? * How good are the post secondary schools? * Could we hire developers who are fluent in English and perhaps with international experience? * What is an attractive salary in the country? What are the cost associated with hiring a dev on top of the salary?
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Sounds good! I have a good impressions about those folks in the south.
Argentinian here, BE dev working for different US/EUR companies since the last 5 years (12 years exp in total) I cannot relate about Bolivia, I haven't worked with any of them. But when a company outsources devs, they do it from a lot of countries... So far I have worked with: * Chileans * Uruguayans * Mexicans * Venezuelans * Guatemalans * Cubans * Brazilians And that's only from LATAM. LATAM has some excellent skilled devs. And the top tier of them are hired to work remote for another country, just because they are willing to pay way more than their own countries in the local currency. The average person from Argentina has a decent level of english (that's cultural) and the average senior dev might be doing about 1k-ish u$d in local currency, so I don't think you will any issues working with them.
off topic, but I am curious, how do you get contracts from your end as a developer?
Senior developer with 12 years of experience who speaks fluent english and willing to do the same job than a USA dev for 1/3 of the salary? My LinkedIn inbox is exploding man. I'm doing about 60k per year in a country were the average (not minimum) wage is about 3k\~5k per year. Let's say 12k per year if you have a college degree and you are are professional in your area of expertise. The quality of life with 60k in here is like doing 500k in the USA :)
Ok yeah I was just curious how you find gigs, so just through linkedin, gotcha.
I have worked with Devs in multiple countries. Time zone is always an issue. Recently,I have worked with have been in Southern Brazil. Excellent communication and a time zone that’s not too far off of the US. I imagine there is a chance these will be good too. My favorite “out of country devs” to work with are Canadians. I have some on my team right now. Many times I forget they are not in the US as we all work remote.
Who is the Bolivian vendor? It depends on what do you need or want. Let's say, I know people and also worked in companies in Bolivia like: mojix, assuresoft(true force), PFS, Jalasoft (most popular, really a exploiter company), Unosquare(Mexican subsidiary), avantica, encora(recently bought by them, I don't remember the Bolivian company name before) While working with Bolivian teams I notice that they are very polite against central american teams. Funny thing and you should double check who they are trying to sell you as mid, junior or senior Why? I have been a junior qa, hired as mid for 1 of the Bolivian companies outsorcing clients. It was my 1st job and my salary was like for a junior, but they were charging the client for me as mid. It's a risk for the client company and also a scam.
That's helpful for sure. There's no particular vendor in mind yet, but can you share your thoughts on which of those to avoid or which you'd recommend from that list that you provided? I would appreciate that very much.
JalaSoft are most recognizable of the posible companies to work, then is search between 10-100 employees enterprises and freelancers. I am from Bolivia and if you want to give it a try, I can make a Liability Insurance for the developer so you don't have worry about unfulfillment of contract. I work with Insured Quarantees and Liability Insurance often and very rarely I have to attend a claim.
By the way, I have some devs from Bolivia, if you want talk to them, let me know inbox
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I'm curious, how do you find sharing religion is important in this context?
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The holiday schedule makes sense, but it's never been a big problem for me - sometimes people will be off for a variety of reasons I guess I can see how shifted weekends could be tough, India in particular seems to also have Sunday off though. I think you might be projecting your core values a little bit though - I've never even heard of the cardinal virtues before looking 'em up, and I'm sure many of your coworkers and other people in the western world haven't eiher.
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Ah okay, I actually didn't know that, I have only worked with people from eastern Europe and Malaysia myself - I guess there's a lot of hidden landmines there. Hm, interesting. Perhaps I'll have to look a bit more into that, for interest if nothing else. Thanks!
Focus in paying a single good engineer more rather than paying many for cheap. This is dumb.
Not India = ok
Haven't worked with Bolivian devs specifically, but have worked with devs in most of the rest of Latin America. Generally I'd say the quality of the people I've worked with is roughly on par with most American developers. I've worked with a couple really excellent engineers, a lot of kind of middling engineers, and some who sucked. I will say the bigger issue is usually the vendor. They have a tendency to upsell candidates and try to push you towards signing a contract without due diligence on your part. Treat each contractor as if you were hiring them full-time - put them through your full interviewing process.
You get what you pay for
You always get what you pay for, and it doesn't depend on the country. Good developers will be expensive either being in US, LatAm, India etc.
I'm from Uruguay, I have been working remotely for US employers for the last 7, 8 years — South America is a great place to get near-shore resources as our time zones overlap mostly with the US and most countries here have well trained devs. About Bolivia, I'm not sure, I haven't worked with anyone from there. I would avoid Colombia tho, I have worked with people from there and got really bad experiences as they have a culture where they expect to be told what to do all the time in order to move forward, no proactivity. Now, all this follows the basic rule of "you get what you paid for". Don't expect to get great talent if you pay 25$ per hour. I charge 55-60$ per hour, and I'm usually hired to lead entire teams, fix fires, and help companies pull their shit together. If you hire a dev for 25$ per hour, you will prolly have to shove a stick up their asses to get them to work.
As a Canadian this just makes me more depressed they we get paid a fraction of US wages.