| I was in the tech sector in Mexico around 2007-2011. This article seems quite accurate to me. I even fact-checked the official motto of Monterrey, and yeah, it is "el labor templa el espíritu".[1] Quite an obscure fact! I asked my regio coworker, and he had no idea what it was. And yeah, the stereotype in Mexico is that regios are all businessmen, ranchers, conservative, and stingy.[2] Kind of like their neighbours the Texans. :-) Anyway, the thing that struck out to me as a Mexican at the time is that all of the actual "business" was coming from somewhere else. You can read in the article how Guadalajara is a city where a lot of foreign companies host some offices. When I was looking for jobs, by far the most common kind of thing was some local recruiting agency looking for outsourced workers to complement US or sometimes European companies.[3] This bothered me a little because it seemed like the long tail of the colonialism that plagues Mexico's history. This is not to say that there are no purely local startups, who are trying to sell locally. Some of the startups mentioned in the article like Métros Cúbicos were already bought by 2011. I myself had a brief stint at a startup that was doing some very interesting machine learning in 2011. My heart wasn't in it and I failed the trial period. But I did get to see that it had several local clients, including a major nation-wide cineplex chain. They were also working at the time in growing their business into the US, and looking at their website, it looks like they are succeeding. I had the privilege to work with some very smart hackers, I must say. One of my first jobs was with a company whose local office largely consisted of a band of buddies that knew each other since university and boasted amongst its ranks kernel hackers. The company was actually Spanish (Spaniard), but the Mexican office was quite sizable. Like probably most other countries, the vast majority of tech in Mexico is based on turnkey, replaceable Java-style software developers, but there do exist pockets of great innovation. Ultimately I left Mexico to work at the actual company that I was being outsourced to. Not because I was facing any kind of hardship -- on the contrary, my outsourced salary in the end was quite generous in Mexican terms -- but because I wanted to be where the action was. But if the action is now back in Mexico, I am considering moving back. ---- [1] http://portal.monterrey.gob.mx/tu_ciudad/historia.html [2] An example of an old Mexican sketch comedy show parodying this stereotype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNI5KLLTfLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbJ18S80ig#t=284 [3] You can see an example of this attitude in Agave Lab, one of the companies mentioned in the article: http://www.agavelab.com/why-mexico.html |