Comment by emmelaich
Not sure that'd even work. The best developers would get paid a lot more by working for a for-profit company, probably US-based. It's just too tempting.
Not sure that'd even work. The best developers would get paid a lot more by working for a for-profit company, probably US-based. It's just too tempting.
Maybe, but if you actually want to poach people, you have to make large pay offers to get them to jump ship. So instead of just paying the prevailing rate for SWEs in $country, they need to actually look at how much those devs are making in the US and match that. Sure, it'll be expensive, but if it's only a handful of key people, it doesn't matter.
Trick is to start some sort of commune in Colombia and attract talent with the local amenities. Nice private community full of 10-15 software engineers, private chefs, security, etc would be less than $1-2k/month per person. Maybe turn it into a vacation spot: “tired of your work? Take 6 month sabbatical to come party in LATAM while making meaningful software. Work hard/play hard - apply by linking to the most meaningful PR you have contributed to an FOSS project.”
Honestly not a bad plan.
After this election, not a horrible idea, but I'm not sure Columbia is the best choice for a destination. Panama would probably be a lot better, and you wouldn't need to make a commune. Panama City is a pretty decent-looking place, and even has a subway system that makes the public transit in the US look bad. Costa Rica would be good too.
Go for it. But based on reaction to my prior comment it looks like everyone wants someone to drop everything and dedicate their life to a web browser, but nobody wants to do it themselves.
IME, the best developers tend to be genuinely passionate about principles.
They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.
"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.