U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
The headline says &quot;pillaging,&quot; which is a kind of stealing by force.  But actually (as the less editorialized HN headline says) what the US companies are doing is <i>hiring</i> Latin America&#x27;s tech talent, paying a fair price instead of the shitty prices Latin American companies are used to paying.  Unsurprisingly these companies think of Latin American developers as their property, so they see it as &quot;pillaging&quot;.  Because I&#x27;m a liberal I don&#x27;t see it that way.<p>Governments often also see this as &quot;pillaging&quot;, since they&#x27;re answerable to powerful company founders who lose out, not the everyday people who benefit.  In a lot of cases they put major roadblocks in the way of people who export technical services in this way.<p>For example, here in Argentina, you are required to convert your earnings immediately into pesos at the official rate, which is half the real rate.  <i>That&#x27;s</i> pillaging.  In effect this is a 50% export tariff, used not to provide government services but to subsidize importation and travel abroad for rich Argentines, making most exportation wildly unprofitable; programming services have low enough costs that they can still remain afloat, at least until the programmers move abroad, but any export business with a substantial cost of sales is unviable.  Bitcoin is a common way for such developers to get paid here in Argentina.  I don&#x27;t know about other countries.<p>Argentina has a strong crab-bucket or zero-sum mentality, justified by the belief that anyone who is rich got that way by screwing over other people, so as long as the government can direct attention to the exporters instead of the importers, there&#x27;s strong public support for confiscatory policies like the fake exchange rate --- even when they harm the poor instead of helping them.<p>It&#x27;s probably true that people like López Conde can get away with paying their employees 20% of the market rate as long as those employees don&#x27;t speak English --- but probably not for very long.  Spanish is the most-spoken second language in every state in the US, and in New Mexico where I grew up half the population speaks it.