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- [00:00]
A
So I don't need to be like a Super, like a 10 points developer anymore, because with AI, if I'm a 7, probably I can be a 9 like you say. So it's super amazing and exciting time to be alive.
- [00:13]
B
Sometimes I think about, like, the idea of regenerating regenerative code bases and how, if that's even possible, I know technically it'd be possible, but would it be good for a company? Would it be practical for a business to have like, regenerative code base where a customer puts in a bug ticket and somehow, like, it writes? Hey there. I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a hub husband, dad of three, and the founder of Ever Be, Ever Be Everbee. Ever Be, where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator, and I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories, and the edge to build something that actually lasts. This is where next generation builders get built. Roger. What's up, man?
- [01:06]
A
I'm fine. Are you?
- [01:08]
B
I'm great. I'm happy that you're here. We're. I'm excited to talk in, talk about AI and talk about, I don't know, vibe coding, talk about hiring engineering and developers all across the world, particularly in Latin America.
- [01:24]
A
Yeah, yeah. I'm from Argentina, so I'm happy to, to share some of my experience working with, with, with the US with people from Argentina. Also talking about vibe coding, AI and anything.
- [01:38]
B
Well, it's cool because that's why I love having a podcast. I just wanted to, like, make. I want to kind of pat myself on the back a little bit because I love having a podcast because I get to have selfish conversations and then people get to, like, hear them. So I get to learn from you and learn about your story, but also learn about the drawbacks of things. And it's part of my job, which is, which is super cool. So I think I'm lucky in that way. So I'm excited.
- [02:03]
A
Yeah. Yeah. It's always insightful, you know, to not only be the host, but also going to different shows. It's always, like, very insightful also for me, because you have this kind of like relaxing conversations, talking about life, about technology, about business. And I'm like a big believer that you, you always get something from those conversations. So that's, that's the idea.
- [02:30]
B
Yeah, I agree. I, I think about this too, it kind of brings something to my mind of when I was talking to maybe it was my nephews or my little brother years ago, and we're talking about books and, and how you, like, read a book to learn. And the idea was that I think either they asked it or something came to my mind and they were like, how do you remember everything in the book, though? You know? And I'm just like, you don't. You. You get one thing out of that book, it can change your life. Just one. Just one thing. And if you can get two, oh my gosh, you. And if you can get three, you literally struck gold. Like, it. The whole point is not to digest the entire podcast and entire book. It's the. To pick one thing to. To take you to, you know, next chapter.
- [03:16]
A
Well, now with ChatGPT, you can ask for the summary of the book so you don't even have to read the entire book. I believe that it's better to read the entire book because just because of reading and starting, like connecting the dots, you start thinking new things that maybe are not written, but it just ideas on your mind. But if you don't have time or if you need, like the top 10 tips that I can get from this book, even today, it's much easier than it used to be.
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, I agree with you. I'm still kind of forming my opinion on this, on the ChatGPT versus a book thing at this point in my life with technology way it is. I believe in both. And just depending on what I'm trying to achieve, there's certain skill sets that you need to be indoctrinated into. Like, you need to be emotionally bought into the story to actually make a transition into your life. And there's sometimes you just need to, like, know the answer and. Yeah, you know, and you need to be able to ask and bounce it off. And so, like, using them together is probably my answer for myself now is like, how do I read the book and also ask questions against ChatGPT? Against the book the entire time?
- [04:27]
A
Yeah, it's like, I mean, talking about AI, like, every little thing that we have now regarding AI, I think the super powerful, powerful thing that we have, it's being in the middle, like, with the human in the middle. I mean, not only being super strict in terms of, no, I won't use AI and I will only read books. And on the other hand, not thinking that AI will replace books. So having the best of the. Of the two worlds, I think that's the way. And that's what we are doing also when it comes to writing code or helping businesses. And I think every single professional should start working that way because AI will disrupt everything, basically. I mean, designer, developer, doctors, lawyers, account.
- [05:21]
B
Everything Completely, completely agree with this. I, it doesn't need to always be like this or that. It can be this and that and equals powerful, like more powerful. And it's the convergence, convergence of all these technologies that are going to move us forward. So our mindset though, needs to be corrected on it. I, I run into sometimes friends even that are like anti AI for whatever reason. They're like, oh, I just like, almost like this. Like they put themselves like above it, like, oh, I only read books. Or like. And you're like, huh, that's such a weird stance. It's a stubborn, it's a stubborn ego stance in my opinion. Like to think that you need to make a decision like that. You don't need to make that decision. It's just, it's like saying, hey, Roger, I don't know the answer to that, but like Google it. And you're just like, I don't use Google. I'm gonna look at the encyclopedia, like, why would you do that? That's so sick.
- [06:19]
A
But I do know that, that in life there are many people that don't want to say I don't know. And I think one of the biggest values that you could have as a person and also as a professional is saying, I don't know. For instance, when we do interviews to candidates, we expect from them to say, hey, I don't know this. So many times we ask, oh, hey, okay, how do you think this topic that you don't know? Because I understand that you can't know everything in the world. So I'm interested about how do you think this? Because it's even more important. The ability to learn new things, I think is. But it will be more important than not knowing things because knowledge is there. It's in the Internet, in, in AI, in books, everywhere. But the skill that we should start developing like very soon is learning to learn. Because if we learn how to learn, we can go everywhere.
- [07:34]
B
Really, really cool. Roger, what do you do? So everyone understands what you do and kind of your back backstory?
- [07:42]
A
Yeah, I'm a software engineer, so I started calling when I was 15 years old, more than 20 years ago. Such a, such a long time ago. 14 years ago, I founded my own company. The name of the company is Brangly and we are a software development company where we help us based company to hire software Engineers in Latin America, most of them are in Argentina because I'm from Argentina and I live here in Argentina. And some of them are in Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, other countries from Maria America. But the powerful thing here is that we discovered 15 years ago that there is a really, really big opportunity for talent from South America to work for big companies in the US and also for big companies in the US to hire like a really, really good and cool talent from Latin America working for with people in the same time zone, being super against other regions or even more hiring people internally in the US So we have been like evolving and developing our business and after Covid everything went faster because before COVID many people used to think, okay, I need the developer to be like sitting next to me. And after Covid that changed and that was super cool for our business. So we grew a lot since COVID Amazing.
- [09:27]
B
So essentially let's say a company like Everbee for example, which we have 45 full time employees across the world. So essentially if I wanted to.
- [09:41]
A
Hire.
- [09:41]
B
More engineers, I would go to Roger and go to Brantley and actually ask you what? And I'd say, hey, I'm looking for a merge stack engineer. And then you'd go find them. Or is it something that you guys have on people on the bench? Or like how does that work?
- [09:54]
A
Sometimes we have people on bench and sometimes we do the, the search. The thing is that most of the times we try not to have people in bench because two things. First, good developers are not willing to be in bench because they get bored and they want a project. So if you have too many people in bench, probably they are not like the best developers in the world. And second, because we, we, we are not like a normal staffing agency. We go, we go through a process where we understand your needs are your goal in terms of business. And then we go and find the, the specific fit, the specific person and candidate for the, the role and the goal that you are looking for. And we are engineers because we are software engineers. We are a software development company, so we are engineers betting engineers. It's not like a recruiting agency. So one of the values that we bring to a table is that if you tell us, hey Roger, I need a full stack developer. We will not present to you like 20 developers, 30 developers or candidates. We do the whole process and at the end of the process we will tell you, hey, this is the one. Go jump to jump into an interview. So you will. The thing that we discovered is that most of the times CTOs don't want to waste time interviewing. And they waste. And the correct word is waste. They waste a lot of time interviewing people. That doesn't make sense for the position because they are working with recruiting agencies with, with basically non technical recruiters. So in NORCA is we present to the CTO the right person or two persons. So it's most of the times they invest only like an hour, two hours in the whole process. So the, the, the big thing here is that they can get the right talent all investing an hour instead of investing 30 hours, 40 hours, whatever.
- [12:07]
B
I see. Okay, yeah, I completely see the value in that. And as far as like you guys, you said you're not like a normal staffing agency which would typically charge a, a percentage on this, the yearly salary as a fee. What do you guys model? How does, how does a company typically pay you guys? How do you guys make money?
- [12:24]
A
We, we have two different models. One model is the, the staffing model where we hire the candidate, you pay us in your US company and we take care of hiring, retention, paying the salary, benefits, PTOs, everything. So you are dealing with an US company, but you are getting access to talent in Latin America. And that model is focused on technical founders or technical companies. Because we can't assign a developer to a company, to a client if they are not technical, because they don't know how to talk to a developer. And that will fail. And we know it because we did it and it went wrong. So that's for technical companies or technical founders. When it comes to non technical founders or non technical companies, we always assign an entire team, something we call a squad. And it has a software developer, a project manager and a qa. And in those cases we help them think the roadmap, think the product, think what to kill and what to do. And it's super powerful for us because in that model we can get involved in the business, in the product that they are building. You know that many times when it comes to staffing model, it's difficult to get involved because since we have technical people on the other side of the client, the client usually say, okay, just give me the developer. I appreciate your support, but I don't need like your advice about how to build or how to run my product. So the amount of involvement that we can get, it's limited. On the other side, when we assign an entire team, we are super involved in the, in the process and we are super involved in understanding the business, understanding how we can do and create like new products, even inside the product. So it's more exciting I know a.
- [14:26]
B
Lot of friends that own software companies and some of them are, you know, they're, they're stage, you know, five and then some of them are like, you know, brand new companies spinning out a product and totally different types of problems when it comes to hiring. But I recognize that that is such a challenging time to be in when you're first starting because typically you have an MVP or maybe you need to hire, you need to build an MVP step one. And then you actually, then it's like I remember this, this thing would ever be this stage of MVP to like I need to grow up a little bit too and to probably start hiring people inside of my team. But you don't have the finances to support hiring people inside of your team. So you're like at this very challenging phase. And we ended up hiring somebody, one person part time instead of our, instead of our team. And that was the right move for us. But there wasn't really, I wasn't aware of like solutions like squad for example. Like your solution there, I don't think that maybe didn't exist at the time so much. And that would have been a totally awesome solution because you kind of have a team, you get to kind of like pay fractional probably, or at least you need to, you get to pay a little bit less versus hiring an entire team all dedicated towards you.
- [15:42]
A
Yeah, exactly. How many times we work with clients, we usually work with clients that they want to build like a long term relationship, like ongoing projects. But other times we have people that say, hey, I need this team only for, I know, a year or six months because I want to do a spin off on my product. But then if that works, I will like keep going ahead with my internal team. And it makes sense because I mean if you are a technological company, like a tech company, it makes much more sense to have staff and nation or have your, your internal team not having a squad because you are technical leadership or you have a technical leadership and you know how to deal with developers. So both models are great. I mean squads and stuff. Amendation are great for technical founders in different moments. For non technical founders, we always offer the squad because we have been doing this for 15 years and we know that we, if we assign a developer to a non technical person that will explode.
- [16:47]
B
Because I'm asking for friends here because other friends, I know they're having this, this issue at least I'm pretty aware they're having this issue. I want to ask questions for them. How do you typically charge for squad, for example? You Said there. So there's 1pm One I think you said one engineer and then one QA I think is what you said.
- [17:08]
A
Yeah, we usually, we usually have like a full time developer and fractional pm, because if you have like a small project only with one developer, you don't need a full time project manager. So maybe you have a full time developer with 40 or 50 hours a month of a project manager and 20 hours of QA. We are using AI to run the tests. We are also backing that with a real person, a tester. But we discovered last month that instead of charging maybe 40 hours a month of QA, we can charge 20 or 15 and have the same amount of coverage because of AI. And the same happened with project managers. I know when we used to sell like maybe 40 hours of management per month, like most of those hours were dedicated to create documents and summaries of the meetings and those things. And all that world now is solved by AI. So now the 40 hours are much more a higher quality I would say, because they invested 40 hours talking with the client, talking with the team, thinking about the roadmap and not like writing documentation because we have tools that can write documentation. Like, just works like magic. Always with a human in the middle.
- [18:44]
B
Sure.
- [18:45]
A
Much quicker. Yeah.
- [18:47]
B
Okay. What are your thoughts on Vibe coding and this whole like this new era of software development? Let's say that, I mean, I remember I was just talking to a friend and he wants to start a company. He, he has, he has this idea and he's like, and he's pretty and he's. And he's fairly technical. He's smart and. But he's not an engineer. I wouldn't say. And so he's like Vibe coded his like first product. I guess you could say, where does this, what are the advantages? And then where are the drawbacks? Like when does he need to actually hire someone to actually help him kind of build the back end or like at least complete the product, you know what I'm saying? To where he could actually go and have a stable product. What are your thoughts?
- [19:31]
A
I think that by coding it's perfect for the first like version. If you want to test the product, market fit or test an experiment or I know obviously for the front end, like testing prototypes for the first phase of the project is perfect. Then if you want to start doing more complex things, I think you need an engineer. And also it's a super powerful tool. We are using it and everyone should be using by coding. I think that it's like hitting down the barriers for colors. But at the end of the day it's like, I know four years ago for being a developer, you used to understand assembler or binary code. And then the high level languages came, C, Visual Basic, Java, php, whatever. And we learned how to ask things to the computer in English, like writing code. And now I think that the bytecoding, it's another level of abstraction of that journey. So it is easier today, before AI to code than four years ago. 100%. It would be easier to be a developer in two years or now than before AI and by coding 100%. But you still need people that understand how to ask the right questions and how to ask and write the right prompt. I don't think that it's true that my, that my aunt will be able to, to create an E commerce or their own platform or at least not in the professional level. But I truly think that they will be much closer than they used to be. So in summary, it's an amazing tool. I think we all have to use it and we all have to embrace AI because it's not a hype, it's not the future, it's the present and it's changing. And we are probably living the biggest revolution in history. So we have to embrace them and understand that our business will change. I mean, I know that my business in two years will change like a lot. So we are working on that, trying to understand, okay, how can we like rethink our business in terms of being alive in two years.
- [22:08]
B
I know, it's very interesting.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah.
- [22:10]
B
Especially your business. Right. Because you have to think about this a lot because you are in the business of software engineering. And software engineering is rapidly evolving right now. Right.
- [22:19]
A
Every week it's a new adventure.
- [22:21]
B
Oh my gosh. Yeah. And then you have like this whole narrative of like software engineering is going to go away. Right. Like you don't need like software engineers is dead. And like there's, there's that the extreme over here.
- [22:34]
A
Yeah.
- [22:34]
B
And then there's like, then there's the people that are like, no way. And then there's like what you kind of just said is like, well, it's going to change.
- [22:41]
A
I'm super optimistic and I think that new jobs will be in our minds. I mean new jobs will be, the world will create new jobs that we can't imagine now. And it's like thinking that 30 years ago or 40, I know when, when Excel came accountant were going to disappear and they changed. So it's important to be flexible and embrace the change.
- [23:12]
B
Completely agree with you.
- [23:14]
A
Something that it's difficult, it's easy to say, but very difficult to, to put in practice.
- [23:19]
B
There's sometimes it's, sometimes it's painful and there's a lot of, sometimes there's layers inside of our minds that block us from wanting to change because we've, as the older we get, we get a little bit more in our ways. And then when you have someone coming in and writing what you've been done, what you've worked your entire life to do, write code and then someone, some kid who's 12 years old in his bedroom does it in like 30 seconds, it's kind of a gut shot. I mean it's, it's. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure it could be a gut shot. But I agree with you. I'm, I'm optimistic about the future of just all this stuff. My opinion, you know, we have engineering of. I think our engineering organization is 25, 26 people full time engineering. And the way that we talk about AI is we need to be using it, we need to be AI forward AI first. And the way our narrative is that we don't. I don't believe it's going to replace engineers by itself. I think what it'll do is it'll make good engineers better and it'll make great engineers, like unstoppable.
- [24:34]
A
Yeah.
- [24:35]
B
It'll amplify a great engineer by so many. Like it'll make them superstars because they're asking the right questions.
- [24:45]
A
Yeah. And besides, for instance, I, I recognize myself. I mean I, I used to be a developer, but I don't think that I used to be like an amazing developer. But my value 15 years ago was that I was super good understanding businesses. So the combination between being like a middle bar developer and the superpower of getting involved in business was super cool. So imagine now having that skill of being involved in businesses but powered by AI. So I don't need to be a 10 points developer anymore because with AI, if I'm a 7, probably I can be a 9 like you say. So it's super, super like amazing and exciting time to be alive.
- [25:39]
B
It's really fun. And I know we're kind of getting very challenging also like easier too in some ways, but also more challenging. It's interesting, I know we're kind of talking about like more engineering and probably people listening to this predominantly are not engineering, so they can, they'll probably, probably lose them here. But it's interesting to think about because I sometimes I think about like the idea of regenerating regenerative code bases and how, if that's even possible. I know technically it'd be possible, but would it be good for a company? Would it be practical for a business to have, like, regenerative code base where a customer puts in a supports, like, puts in a bug ticket, and somehow, like, it's.
- [26:20]
A
It writes and just. Yeah.
- [26:22]
B
And then all of a sudden it does it, and then it puts them through qa. Like, in theory, this should work. In theory, yeah.
- [26:29]
A
I can't see it yet, but I know that it will happen because now it's working, but it's not working well. But eventually we'll start working well because it's like, moving forward every week.
- [26:43]
B
It is? Yeah. Even, like, feature requests. I mean, if you think about it, even feature requests, hey, I want this button to be here. And then, like, this agent is smart enough to understand. Okay, where do you want this button? Oh, 10 people ask for the same button in the same location, and then all of a sudden it, like, starts building a use case and it starts to, like, actually generate a prd.
- [27:08]
A
The thing is that the AI, it's not intelligent, but it has an amazing power to process data. So it can, like, seems to be intelligent since. Since it has the capacity to analyze. Analyze like huge volumes of data. So. But in the core, it is. It is not intelligent, but it seems to be.
- [27:38]
B
It seems to be. Yeah. It's interesting. Which means that it kind of is. Even though we know that it's not. It's interesting. You ready for the rapid fire questions?
- [27:46]
A
Roger? Yeah.
- [27:48]
B
What's your favorite business book?
- [27:52]
A
Get the Grip.
- [27:53]
B
What is this? What book is this?
- [27:55]
A
It's for implementing eos. It's a framework.
- [28:00]
B
Get a brick.
- [28:01]
A
Get a grip. Grip.
- [28:03]
B
Get a grip. Oh, okay. Is that from Gino Wickman?
- [28:07]
A
Yeah.
- [28:08]
B
Okay. I read Traction. I have not read Get a Grip.
- [28:12]
A
They are cousins. Yeah.
- [28:13]
B
Okay.
- [28:14]
A
Like the books? Pretty similar.
- [28:16]
B
Beautiful. What's the one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your business?
- [28:24]
A
That's a really good question. There are so many, but one of the most important if understanding that, like, walking this path of being an entrepreneur alone was going to be super hard. And I always regret about not. Not being connected to the world, to the ecosystem. In my early years, I think that I started asking for help and connecting with our entrepreneurs and doing these kind of things too late, Maybe three or four years ago.
- [28:58]
B
You mean like building your network and like, actually asking, like, other entrepreneurs, for example, for support or just connected with them?
- [29:05]
A
Yeah.
- [29:06]
B
Interesting. Last Question. Who do you think should be a business owner?
- [29:16]
A
Someone who doesn't want to be like their own boss. That's not the path. Someone who is ready to be in a roller coaster every day. Every fucking day it's a roller coaster. There are days where you feel that being an entrepreneur is the best decision you have ever made. And there are other days where you think, oof, I don't want to do this again, like having this like tough conversation. So you have to be super, super resilient and ready to go through that path. Because many times I talk with my friends, non entrepreneur friends and they think that I live in a limbo. No, you are super cool because you have your own company and. Okay, man, I can't. You, you won't understand. So, so yeah, there was no point. I love that.
- [30:19]
B
Thanks for sharing that. There was, I was at a barbecue a couple months ago. It, it, you reminded me of this and we were talking about like just our days for some reason. Like we were in a circle and there was like, you're just talking about like our days and typically our work days. What does it look like? And you know, somebody shared theirs and somebody shared. And then I was, you know, actually and then they got to me and then somebody jumped in and was just like, what do you do? You probably just like play like you just like, you don't really have to.
- [30:49]
A
Playing golf.
- [30:50]
B
Yeah, I remember being like, oh, it's such an interesting perception, you know. And then I like, by the way, I get zero offense to this. If anything it's a compliment maybe. But the reality is I kind of answered. I'm like, no, I still work like 50, 55 hour weeks. You know, it's. My work might just look different than your work. Like your work is like showing up and sitting in your chair and like you have to, you have to show up and click. But my work is like, I don't.
- [31:21]
A
Know, I'm always thinking, yeah, things.
- [31:24]
B
Yeah, you're obsessed. You're obsessed with this business and in a good way. And that was, that was an interesting learning for me that the definitions of work start to blend.
- [31:37]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
- [31:42]
B
Roger, where can people find you, follow you, learn more from you and about you.
- [31:46]
A
I am on LinkedIn so if they find my name in on LinkedIn, I'm the only Roger Anstos. So they will find me also in the website if, if they can. If they send an email to the website, I will be responding. But LinkedIn is the best way of, of connecting. Yeah.
- [32:07]
B
Beautiful, Roger. Thank you for your time. I appreciate you coming on, man, and look forward to staying connected and learning more as. As you. As you continue on your journey.
- [32:16]
A
Thank you so much for, for. Hi.
- [32:18]
B
Okay, man, so I'll talk to you soon.
- [32:20]
A
Bye.
- [32:20]
B
Bye.