My adventure with Ecuadors’ Tech community started in 2016 when I was scouting tech hubs to hire developers. I had a choice between setting up our second IT office in either Quito, Ecuador or Santiage, Chile. Both countries have been attracting and pumping out solid developers from their universities and education push.
In the end I decided to choose Quito, Ecuador and these are the 7 reasons why.
1. Talent Pool is Strong
When I arrived in Quito, Ecuador I quickly got acquainted to the tech scene by visiting many co working spaces. My favorite ended up being Buen Trip Hub that was a Startup space + a Accelerator. Through their founders and community I met many developers of all ages and backgrounds. I attended a few code bootcamps and hackathons and the turnout was always healthy and strong. I saw no limit to the amount of developers available.
2. American Advantage
There is myriad of benefits that ring to the mind of developers working with American companies, across the board many developers stated they enjoyed the culture far more than the one in Quito, Ecuador development shops and they enjoyed the freedoms to code from home, learn new skills, and generally have a healthy friendly environment. There’s also a prestige of working with a growing American tech company.
3. Competitive Salaries
My ratio for developers is simple, when I worked with Venezuelan developers, you could get about 6 solid developers for the price of 1 American or European developer. In Ecuador the salaries a little higher, but the ratio was usually 3 solid developers for the price of 1 western developer. This multiple applies to everything from junior to senior
4. Latest Technologies
A lot of the tech talent I’ve seen in the Quito Tech Hub are younger folks, in my experience developers from the age of 18-25 have an expertise in Angular and Ruby on Rails. The universities here are also encouraging the latest languages by adding them to their curriculum at the tech schools.
5. Similar Tech Culture
This tip only applies to developers working at smaller shops or progressive companies. Developers trained by younger CEO’s were using tools such as slack, jira, asana, and more. Scrums and Springs were common through out and M & F meetings were common. Culture wise everything is very similar.
6. Experience with American Companies
In my pursuit to find the best talent at the price point I could afford, I found a niche group of developers that have catered themselves to work with American companies. A lot of developers taught themselves English and American customs, going as far as taking American holidays off versus Ecuadorian ones to work.
7. Lack of Good Bosses
Quito, Ecuador like many South American cities is undergoing rapid westernization and this shows in the tech culture. The older generation of business people place a different level of importance on development. This shows all over the country with banking systems being so antiquated they only run on Internet Explorer 5.5. A lot of developers get burned out by working in Ecuadorian firms run by a different generation and are always striving to find new work places where they are treated better, given more prospects, and even paid on time.