Which country in LATAM has the most and best developers?

Which country in LATAM has the most and best developers?

Latin America surely is a thriving region in everything software-related. Despite this latitude’s inequalities and unsteady developing economies, there is great talent down south.

The Latin American countries with the most and best developers are:

• Brazil
• Mexico
• Argentina
• Colombia
• Chile

Which country in LATAM has the best developers based on its unicorns

This may not come as a surprise given the number of native tech unicorns in these countries. Brazil, of course, given its population size is the main go-to for most tech companies. Argentina and Colombia are also very important tech hubs.

Source:

https://contxto.com/en/market-map/the-21-latin-american-unicorns-galloping-to-success/

If we measure the quality of the developers given a country’s output of highly productive big tech companies the winner undoubtedly will be Brazil. With Argentina getting a very surprising second-place given the economic setbacks the nation is facing lately.

A more rigorous way to expand this metric would be normalizing the number of unicorns a country has by its total population size.

By doing so, using the data from the infographic previously shown we get the following ranking:

*Duolingo’s founder is Guatemalan but the company is actually based in the USA

This not-so-rigorous ranking is not all that bad in informing the average skill of developers per country if we compare it with data such as the one provided by HackerRank in their 2016 study.

Best developers by LATAM country based on skill tests

Source:

https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-country-would-win-in-the-programming-olympics/

Although their results include countries from other regions, you can see that if we only keep Latin American countries, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia make the top 50. This is no small feat at all.

The former scores are given by a series of algorithm ability tests. These challenges are said to be programming language agnostic which makes the outcome even more reliable across the board.

Which country in LATAM has the most developers?

To find out where the most programmers are, a good idea would be to look into which country has the most registered users in GitHub. Of course, this is not absolute and yes, Brazil will be the answer given its population size, but let’s check it out.

Source:https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-developer-locations/

This correlates directly with our data about where the best developers are. More individuals in an industry of course mean more competition and competition drives skill improvement.

As a curious note, it’s surprising to find Venezuela on the 6th spot of the table given the country’s current political and social situation.

Final notes about LATAM developers by country

As I said earlier, Latin America is a very unequal region. This makes talking about skills per country not so true to reality.

Actually, the only places where you could find and source software talent reliably is in the biggest cities of each country. This is important to take into consideration if you’re thinking about relocating your offices or hire contractors/freelance developers.

The picture in these places is very different from province to province and in the majority of cases, all the English-speaking top talent is to be found in the biggest cities.

You should be thinking about Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico D.F., Santiago, Bogota rather than Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, or Colombia.

https://grootjen.tech/