By now, we have established that the software development outsourcing in Latin America is growing by the minute, and that the giants of software outsourcing are slowly losing popularity against this region.
We have also talked about why it is time for you to consider picking latin america software outsourcing partners, and the huge impact latin america software developers have had on the IT outsourcing market in previous blogs.
So now that you know the reasons why latin america is one of the top regions to outsource your software development processes and why latin america software developers are a great option for you, it’s time to talk about the real deal: Hiring latin america developers.
Number of software developers in Latin America
Before we dive in into how to hire latin america software developers, let’s take a quick look at how many developers currently are in the region, what they’re doing, and what they’re specialized in.
According to the annual collection of software development statistic made by Stack Overflow at the beginning of the year, over a million programmers and software developers are currently in Latin America across the many different countries like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Panama.
It is also worth to mention Latin America software developers are amongst the cheapest (yet efficient) software engineers on a global scale, especially when compared to software developers from Europe and North America, this according to a chart made by Angile Engine.
Again, if you would like to know more about how latin america developers have changed the outsourcing market, we recommend you reading our previous blog about it, you will find a lot of useful information you can use to your advantage.
How to hire latin america software developers in 5 easy steps
Hiring a latin america software developer isn’t as different as hiring a software engineer from any other region in the world, or picking an offshore or nearshore partner, if anything, it’s pretty similar. However, there are a few things you must have into consideration to find the right partner, and those things are:
1: Look in the right country
Narrowing down your search for a software developer to Latin America is great, but there are 33 countries in that region alone, so how do you narrow down your search even more? You pick a country that is right for you.
First, pick a country that is relatively close to yours (For example, if your company is based on the US, pick someone from Mexico or Panama) so you reduce language barrier and time zone differences between you and the software engineer.
Second, pick a country that has the qualities you required. For example, Brazil has over 600.000 developers in their country, which opens up the amount of options for you, while Panama has one the top software technologies in the world, and countries like Chile and Argentina are known for their trustworthy developers.
Narrow down your list to one or two countries and move on from there. It will be easier this way to find the right candidate later on, instead of looking literally everywhere.
2: Take a deep look at the talent pool of each country
This goes hand-to-hand with the previous point. Like we mentioned before, Latin America has a great number of software developers in the region, however, not all of them do the same thing.
Mobile developers, data administrator, data or business analysts and QA are very common in Latin America, with most software developers specializing on back-end development.
Again, if you’re looking for engineer managers, QA or test developer, designers or system administrators software developers from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Panama will be your best shot, if you’re looking for game or graphic developers, or DevOps developers, Brazil has a bigger population of developers specialized in those areas.
3: Keep the price in mind
We have said this again, but software development is not cheap but rather cost effective, so looking for a cheap latin america software developer is not a good way to start your search.
However, keeping your budget in mind and how much you’re willing to spend on a software development project will help you determine if you should (or shouldn’t) hire a latin america developer. According to a survey made by StackOverflow, the countries with the higher salaries are Chile, Argentina and Brazil, with software engineers making over $10,000 a year.
So if you are looking for software engineers with a lower cost rate for a small project you should definitely look into other countries. Again, is not about finding a CHEAP solution, but finding a software development engineer that suits your budget while delivering a great job.
4: Ask them what technologies do they use
In the same study made by Stack Overflow it was shown which technologies latin america software developers like to use in their projects, and which ones they don’t like at all.
Ask them which technologies they know how handle, which programming language they use (JavaScript, C#, python?), what’s their experience working with these technologies before and so on.
5: Ask the about their previous experience
Last, but definitely not least, check for their background experience. Ask them what other similar projects they have been involved in, what was their job there, how did they manage to deliver a great job, etc.
Even if you choose to hire an inexpert software developer, they should give you an idea of how they will take on your project, their action plan, the reasoning behind it and an estimated time to give back tangible results.
If the latin america software developer you are interviewing fails to do this, consider it as a red flag and start over until you find the right match for your company and project.
As always, if you would like to work with a team of expert latin america software developers, feel free to contact us at any time and we will gladly help you and take care of your project!
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