Decoded

Latin America and the price war for Software Development services

Things to ponder

In a globalized world as it is currently, the concept of going to an office every day to work is gradually disappearing, and with the current pandemic due to COVID-19 it is forcing a change of concept to what area of work it means.

This change in concept arises since technology currently allows working from home as if you were in the office, meeting hours, handling documentation among many other tasks that generally must be performed in a work area.

There is also a new career in the labor area such as computer systems programming, currently programmers are in high demand for the development of programs that provide solutions to organizational problems in real life, or the creation of web pages that allow a company or business to be visible on the internet (The great network of networks).

Due to the change of concept in the labor area, companies now even use social networks to hire people according to their area of ​​knowledge (verifiable knowledge through a work portfolio or by presenting a test for said job vacancy) to perform either specific jobs by contract or for a fixed salary while they can perform their functions or tasks within the company remotely.

What is the basic knowledge that a person must have to be able to work remotely? There are many areas of knowledge to specialize for this, but the basis knows how to manipulate all the tools in terms of technology for a purpose.

But what is interesting to know is more or less what prices are charged in Latin America for jobs as a freelancer or as a fixed salary within a company that must usually be calculated at a price per hour of work, according to the area of ​​knowledge, in the following URL:

https://explore.payoneer.com/es/freelancer-income-survey-2018/

Just after filling out the form and sending the data, we will be able to download a PDF that is based on the survey they have carried out in an international electronic payment medium such as Payoneer, a very detailed report of the prices that are aspired in different parts of the world will be observed. It should be noted that this survey began in 2018.

But the reality that is shown there is not correct since the reality is another sample of hourly average prices of more than $15 per hour when in Latin America a freelancer programmer can charge up to $5 per hour to be able to subsist on it now that there is immense competition in the area.

Some companies take advantage of this situation where they offer very low salaries but which still allow them to survive, and these companies quote for jobs in Europe and the United States, obtaining good value projects but investing very little in the salaries of their employees for that purpose.

Taking the results of a survey carried out in the Republic of Argentina:

Through the following URL, you can see some interesting data about one of these Latin American countries:

https://sueldos.openqube.io/encuesta-sueldos-2020.01/

In the results shown in the survey, the following is observed:

For a total of 5982 were the total responses in the Argentine Republic. 5633 responses were considered in the analysis, that is, 94.16% of the total, where data such as:

Percentage of participants by type of role in this case can be listed.

  • Developer.
  • Sysadmin / DevOps / SRE.
  • Technical Leader.
  • QA / Tester.
  • Manager / Director.
  • HelpDesk.
  • BI Analyst / Data Analyst.
  • Project Manager.
  • Consultant.
  • Architect.
  • Others.

Among a series of information obtained from the different questions asked the people who participated in it, different data were obtained that the reader can observe in this source, but the most relevant for this article would be the average salary and the level of contribution they give to Open Source projects which we can observe the average salary in local currency to that country and the equivalent in USD.

https://sueldos.openqube.io/encuesta-sueldos-2020.01/#Salarios-Progresion-historica-Mediana-salarial-en-Argentina

As can be seen in this URL, the average salary exceeds 1000 USD, but it should be noted that not the entire population of developers throughout the country that has answered finds it, but it is a good sample to get an idea of what can be achieved to win in Latin American countries with a lot of experience, hard work and some luck.

Although for a Freelancer it takes a lot of effort to achieve this, and they are generally forced to give away the work for a low cost until they are recognized as a good developer.

Now, another topic of very high interest that concerns the world of free software and Open Source is;

“Those who do not contribute to Open Source, and those who do.”

It is observed that a low number of different programmers or developers do contribute to free software and Open Source in general, answering with a “Yes” only 14% of those surveyed.

Although the number of people who contribute to free software and free software in general is low, great advances are still made for different projects in these areas.

In fact, most developers use or have used free software tools either for their learning or for their current daily work, benefiting from the great freedoms that they have with free software.

Although the demand for developers increases there is a limited number of developers, but many clients want freelance developers to give away their work, the advice is always to look for clients who really value the work of developers as they should.

The price per hour for a developer in Latin America according to statistics is 18 USD per hour, but the reality is that many freelance developers looking for job opportunities give away their work for less than this, another growing problem is the appearance of web applications that build websites As if a text document were to lower the costs of web development more, but mobile and desktop developments are still a very well-paid source of work.

Manish Gehlot

I am a privacy, security, encryption and software freedom enthusiast. I am into VPNs, TLS security. Recently I also got into technical writings including guides.

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