Why Your Next 10X Engineer Is Probably in LATAM, Not Silicon Valley

The Growth Insight 🌱

Why Your Next 10X Engineer Is Probably in LATAM, Not Silicon Valley

Picture this: You're a founder in San Francisco, staring at a $300,000 offer letter for a senior engineer. Your budget's screaming, your investors are antsy, and meanwhile, the tech giants down the street are casually tossing around million-dollar packages like they're holiday candy. Sound familiar?

Here's the plot twist that changed everything for me: That same caliber of talent? They're building Latin America's billion-dollar tech empire Nubank and crushing it at Mercado Libre. And they're doing it for a quarter of those Silicon Valley salaries.

The game has changed. Here's what smart companies are doing:

1. Think Global, Win Local

• Stop arm-wrestling with OpenAI over $900K engineers

• Tap into powerhouse tech hubs like São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Bangalore

• Pay great local market rates (still a fraction of SF costs)

2. Culture? It's Not About the Ping Pong Table

• The best remote teams are crushing it with 90%+ engagement

• Real culture is clear communication and trust, not office perks

• Pro Move: Use Notion for docs, Slack for chat, Asana for tasks - keep it simple

3. The Time Zone Secret

• LATAM teams share U.S. time zones (hello, real-time collaboration!)

• More Spanish speakers in the U.S. than Spain = cultural alignment is built-in

• Async work for everything else - if GitLab can do it with 2000+ remote employees, so can you

The companies still clinging to local-only hiring are like Blockbuster watching Netflix rise.

By 2030, we're facing an 87-million-person tech talent shortage. You can either fight for scraps in your local market, or you can build a global dream team that gives you an unfair advantage.

The choice?

That's yours. But I know which side of history I want to be on.

P.S. Yes, there are challenges - security, communication, coordination. But these are solved problems in 2024.

The real question is: Can you afford not to go global?

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Market Shakeup 📊 OpenAI's enterprise market share drops to 35% as Anthropic doubles to 24%, while total AI spending grows five-fold compared to last year.

Browser Battle 🌐 OpenAI plans to launch its own web browser, challenging Google Chrome just as regulators push to break up Google's browser monopoly.