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In 2024, it was Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Argentina's turn to receive branches of the Brazilian unicorn, valued at more than 10 billion dollars. The bank's differential, elected by LinkedIn in 2024 and 2024 as the most desired Brazilian startup to work for, was to build a strong employer brand to the point of being able to hire Brazilians who were outside the country. “We’re targeting Brazilian engineers who are working in companies in different countries because they really want to come back and be part of something meaningful that will change Brazil,” says Renee Mauldin, the company’s chief people officer.

Brazilian companies are competing for scarce local talent with the international market. In the United States alone, there are 472,000 job openings for professionals in this area. Brazilian programmers are technically sound and cheap. While in the United States the average salary for a programmer is $109,000 per year, in Brazil it is $11,000. Another challenge for Brazilian employers is the fact that 87% of technology specialists in the country are willing to try out job opportunities abroad, according to a survey by the Boston Consulting Group in partnership with the recruitment company The Network. This percentage is higher than the global average of 67%. According to the study, Brazilians are more attracted to opportunities in the United States, Canada, Portugal and Germany. For them, what matters most when choosing a job is the possibility of career growth — salary only appears in eighth place on the list.

Change careers to the booming industry

The prospect of an international career led Marcelo Camargo, a celebrity in the world of developers in Brazil, from Santa Catarina, to swap Joinville for Sydney, Australia. At 23, he is a senior software engineer at Atlassian, the largest Australian software company, valued at 18 billion dollars. Here, he became famous for having written the code that gave rise to the “WhatsApp Groan”, a joke that went viral in 2024. In June of last year, he received an offer that he considered irresistible.

He received a hefty amount of company stock when he was hired, earns more than an Australian developer (the average annual salary is around $85,000 in the country) — and works around 8 hours a day. “It’s not like spending the whole day writing code. Part of my time is dedicated to developing projects with other teams,” says the dev, who dropped out of college in information systems after only completing the first year. The leader of a team of four other developers, he receives two or three job offers every week. Camargo has found a diverse and inclusive environment in the technology sector: he is gay and has Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum. “I feel safer here,” he says.

The fact that foreign companies have a large advantage in taking Brazilian developers is a matter of exchange. Therefore, it is up to companies in the country to create strategies to train an increasing number of programmers. In 2024, when deciding to start using robots to perform repetitive tasks in its shared services center, EDP invited the approximately 200 employees in the department to become programmers for the new automated employees. A payroll analyst and an administrative assistant became developers after two months of training, using a platform that does not require in-depth coding knowledge. “We were able to prove, in practice, that technology can be a tool that frees people from manual labor so that they can perform more creative tasks,” says Luis Gouveia, EDP’s director of people, technology and society.

The Technology career is the one that imports the most professionals outside of Brazil.

IN DEMAND AND WELL PAID

YOUNG AND DISPUTED

In three months, 19-year-old Igor Silveira transformed his love of video games into a passion for programming. Having recently graduated from high school, he didn't know what career path to pursue until he took a short course in software development. He finished his training with a job at a consulting firm. If before he was the one distributing his resume to companies, now it's recruiters who keep coming back to him. He receives up to three job offers per week.

ACTIVISM AND CORPORATE LIFE

Since she was little, Keilla Menezes, 35, from Bahia, solved math problems with her engineer father. She studied computer science and took a while to find her field, front-end, the professional who develops the user interface. She always noticed the lack of diversity within companies and today she holds a unique title for herself: the only black woman in the world with a Google Developer Expert certification in Angular.

VETERAN AND MENTOR

Brazilian Bruno Souza, 46 years old, is one of the pioneers of the use of the Java language in Brazil, one of the most popular in the world. It is no wonder that he calls himself the “Javaman”. Founder of one of the largest global communities dedicated to this programming language, he has received international awards for the advances he has achieved. Souza currently divides his time between working as a consultant for companies and mentoring new generations of devs.

Get your first job with just 6 months of study

HOME OFFICE AND SALARY IN DOLLARS

Roberta Arcoverde, 34, has been a software developer for 12 years and learned to program in the computer science course at the Federal University of Pernambuco. Six years ago, she passed a competitive selection process with 900 other people to work at the American website Stack Overflow. Despite receiving several offers to change jobs, she doesn't plan on leaving the comfort of remote work — and her salary in dollars — any time soon.

In a country where 53% of the economically active population is unemployed or in informal jobs, programming is one of the most attractive potential careers. The number of free programming courses is growing throughout the country.

When a company finally manages to hire a talent, it can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Wrong. With companies willing to offer very high salaries to get a qualified programmer, it is difficult to retain professionals. A LinkedIn survey in 2024, with its global base of more than 500 million users, showed that technology is the area with the highest turnover of professionals (13.2%). The Brazilian software factory Lambda3, which counts Banco Santander Brasil among its clients and has a turnover of 15 million reais, employs 70 developers among its 100 professionals and has already fired clients who were demanding an exhaustive workload from their teams or who displayed sexist and homophobic behavior towards employees. “It is so difficult to hire and retain a good professional that I prefer to lose a client most of the time”, says Victor Hugo Germano, founding partner and president of Lambda3.

Better than a Public Tender, there are many vacancies and little competition

This is good news about the sophistication of this market. The weapons tend to go beyond pure and simple money. Putting a price on the developer's work is a growing pain. Different positions and levels of experience have salaries that range from R$3,082 for a systems analyst to R$25,152 for a product manager. A truly attractive salary can often be financially unfeasible. However, what a dev can value most, in the end, is being part of an inspiring team and having greater autonomy and opportunities for new challenges.