What makes Argentine Javascript Devs so Damn Amazing?

If you want to find senior, high-performing Javascript developers at affordable prices – there is no better place in the world to find them than in Argentina.

Most people don’t know it, but Argentina is a world-class country filled with well-educated, English-speaking technologists. Particularly, Javascript engineers. Its unique history combined with present-day politics and economics have made this city a booming place for US companies to find raw talent in Javascripts’ newest frameworks: MEAN and REACT.

What’s the history in a nutshell?

Up until 2001, the Argentine currency was valued at 1:1 to the US dollar. However, in 2001 the Argentine government defaulted on their debts, sending the country into economic collapse. Their currency finally stabilized at a ratio of 15:1 where it sits today.

So, what does this have to do with Javascript developers?

A lot. In order to spur economic growth in the aftermath of the crisis, the government offered major tax incentives to businesses and universities to increase the exportation of IT development services to countries like the US, who have the technological demand and the funds to purchase it. Their goal was to double their IT engineer graduates by the year 2020 in order to generate enough labor supply to have an economic impact.

One of the ways they went about achieving this goal was by pouring money into expanding their universities’ curriculum to include a major focus on javascript’s latest frameworks: MEAN and REACT. These technologies are being used by some of the biggest companies in the US, and the demand for resources trained in these areas is very high. Furthermore, this allowed them to tap into talent from the front-end developer pool in Argentina, which could quickly become back-end developers using MEAN.

They also began to require English and other foreign languages to be included as a part of the core curriculum and a requirement for graduation from these programs.

This way their labor supply would be fluent in the native languages of the countries that they wished to export to.

All of these initiatives, combined with the fact that public universities in Argentina are free for anyone to use, not only greatly increased the amount of English-speaking javascript engineers from Argentina, but also attracted top talent from all over South America who now resides in Argentina after taking advantage of this educational opportunity.

Wow. Anything else?

Yes. The cost of living in Argentina, particularly Buenos Aires, is quite high. It is estimated that over 70% of the students have to work while they are studying and, as a result, getting a university degree takes longer (6-10 years). In order to support themselves during these years, many of them go to work for the major IT companies in Argentina, such as Globant, where they receive excellent on-the-job work training and experience. Working full-time while also going to school takes some great compromises that lead to a strong work ethic.

So, what this culminates to in Argentina is a massive supply of talented, English-speaking Javascript developers who are graduating with 6-10 years of work experience already under their belt. Combine that with a host of other factors which makes this South American country an awesome place to offshore to, and you can then understand why the top companies in the world source their javascript devs from Argentina.