Would love to understand how the friends here see the Brazilian ecosystem, from the economic point of view, political, stability, entrepreneur and education.
I read a lot of economics blogs. A lot of them seem to have the joke, "Brazil is the country of the future, and it always will be!"
The meaning is that Brazil should be a more successful country. Great location, favorable demographics, lots of natural resources, peaceful neighbors, large population, mostly stable government. But it just never quite becomes successful. But in could, in the future! But that's what people also said in the past.
Somewhere I read that around 1900, Brazil had the same GDP per capita as the United States. And that was the peak of Brazil.
I'm not trying to pick on Brazil. I have a favorable opinion of Brazil and its citizens. I hope that Brazil proves the economists wrong and becomes the country that it can be.
I ran an American office in brasil. The best developer community! But drug down by bureaucracy. The reality is that running a company in brasil is about 1000x harder than the US.
Much stronger rights for the enployees. We had employees essentially start protesting against “imperialism” (ie against the american company employing them) and stopped working and would disrupt meetings with passionate speeches anbout gender annd worker rights. This was the result of learning their American engineer counterparts made 3x more than them when they converted their salaries from reals.
we couldn’t fire them. In fact we had to pay them 1 year of salary when we let them go after months of discussions with brasil lawyers.
So good to hire from. Terrible to have an office there.
I'm brazilian, but living abroad almost a decade:
Brazil: - Needs more capital for even very simple projects, like infrastructure, clean water supply etc - Finance/banking sector is really well developed, better than every country I've visited - Brazilians need to learn english, it's the world's language and so many opportunities are missed out - Companies still see Brazil as a country that the legal system is messy, power of law isn't thought to be as most first world countries - It's a country with a lot of potential, but to unlock it, Brazil needs to find something that its good at, that isn't commodities
I think Brazil seems cool in so many ways, but it seems very politically corrupt.
Also, one one observation is if there's a Reddit video clip of some crazy random shooting or assassination or off-duty policeman shooting, it seems to almost always be coming from Brazil, which is pretty scary.
Big country with impressive ecological diversity, extensive natural resources and the standard set of Latin American problems (corruption, extreme inequality, violent crime).
I've been to Brazil close to a dozen times, both for business and for adventure travel (kitesurfing and paragliding). I love the country and the people and have a lot of friends there. I find most Americans overestimate how 'dangerous' Brazil seems to be, based on hearsay. In Brazil I rarely meet other Americans, but do meet lots of adventurous Europeans and others who also love this huge, beautiful, diverse—and of course also troubled—country.
I run a IT services based in Brazil. Deep pool of real talent and commitment to quality in work (very different from what we hear from customers who hire developers from other countries). The country is not cheap though. High taxation makes everything very expensive, from cars (a piece of junk costs $15,000 and up) to MacBooks (US$3,000+). Things like cheese and wine are more expensive than in Europe (and I am talking about locally produced ones).
Once upon a time I wanted to spend new year's eve in Rio. Now I don't want to go because it feels unsafe. I know a lot of great hackers come from Brazil so I know a lot of people still care. That's the thing with countries: they are either getting better or growing worse and Brazil unfortunately seems to fall in the latter category.
From my point of view as a 33 yo Brazilian, we have a lot of natural resources, huge domestic market, a lot of talents.
We're talking about ~210 million people. We're just below USA in population in the American continent.
It's good for countries like USA to look after us, i believe we will eventually grow, we're still a babe democracy, the military dictatorship ended on the 80's.
So we still have a long way to go but we will get there. Brazil is one of the main SOY and Meat exporter. We're evolving greatly on the tech business preparing the man labor and launching startups on the market.
So yeah, keep a look out for us and let's grow together as entrepeneurs.
A country with a huge amount of potential. It's got the third largest manufacturer of airliners in the world, for instance. The only biofuel program that is really profitable. My environmentalist friends really disapprove of JBS but it is another "national champion" that is truly world beating.
Deforestation of the Amazon, kapoeira and carnavals is everything I know about Brasil without googling.
It's full of nice and very talented people, but bad government and infrastructure
Dysfunctional, corrupt country that swings from one corrupt right-wing clown (JBS) to a corrupt left-wing thief (Lula) every four years.
I'm Brazilian, currently living abroad in Europe. However, I'm back often to visit family, so I'm not out of touch with the country. I love Brazil and miss it a lot.
Brazil is a unique country. Like every country, including rich ones, it has its own set of advantages and challenges. I think that most people have an excessively negative image of Brazil, because of the reputation of it being unsafe. In reality, even though it's not as safe as Europe or Japan, it's not nearly as bad as people generally think. Outside of the big cities it's totally fine.
The main problems in Brazil in my view are wealth inequality and corruption. Brazil needs a big political reform to make it really hard for government officials to commit crimes without going to jail. Corruption is a problem because it's not punished, and people at the lower income levels see how this works and see no good way to get out of poverty. It's the main reason many turn to crime, because they see no future. Most people have a good heart and care for each other, though. Brazil has a kind of human warmth which is hard to find elsewhere. That's why many foreigners that go to Brazil say that the best of Brazil is its people, and they are right.
For people curious about Brazil, I recommend going to YouTube and just doing a search for "Brazil" (or "Brasil", for local videos). Recently, with the opening of visa free travel for a few countries, like USA and Japan, a lot of YouTubers started to visit and discover Brazil as a destination, and their videos can give you a rough idea of what to expect if you go. There are also many foreigners that moved to Brazil and make videos about their experience as well. Rio is very beautiful and all, but I don't understand why the obsession with it, I think it's much better to visit somewhere off the beaten path, like Florianopolis, or the Northeast, where Brazilians themselves go for tourism.
For other Brazilians, what I have to say is that Brazil also has many things to be really proud of, like being one of the greenest economies on Earth for its size, with over 80% of electricity coming from renewable sources, and increasing over time. Most cars in Brazil can run on any mixture of Gasoline and Ethanol, due to locally developed flex fuel technology, and I believe EVs will take a back seat to fuel cell ethanol vehicles in the future, so don't feel bad there aren't so many Teslas around. Ethanol is already available everywhere, unlike EV charging stations.
Brazil produces 6x more food than it consumes, so it helps to feed the world (see also Embrapa). However, it also produces airplanes, and other high tech products, even having its own small semiconductor industry. Brazil has a very advanced banking system that puts many developed markets to shame.
Brazil has if not the best, close to the best food in the world, including our local variations on Italian, Japanese and other cuisines, along with our own unique dishes, fruits, etc, which are not found elsewhere. Our culture is rich, with many genres of music unique to Brazil, like choro, which is unfortunately not so well known outside.
Brazil has tremendous biodiversity, and natural beauty in many forms. There are so many places worth to visit, like: Jalapão, Iguaçú falls, Lençóis Maranhenses, Chapada Diamantina, thousands of kilometers of beaches, beautiful islands like Ilha Grande, Ilhabela, Fernando de Noronha, too much to list all here.
Brazil is, paradoxically though, very closed, isolated. Search YouTube for the interesting custom car scene in Brazil to try to understand this a bit. Asianometry also recently put out an excellent video on Brazilian computer industry. In part there is this excessive protectionism, which leads to some commercial isolation, but also immigration is not like in the past when lots of Japanese and Europeans came, even if more recently more and more people are moving to Brazil. Things are more expensive in Brazil in part because of this strategy, which I actually do understand, because Brazil is one of the few countries that can be self-sufficient on most things (tech being a sore exception). When there are wars like now, not being too dependent on the outside world provides the country with stability.
When I retire, I'd like to go back to Brazil. If you mostly ignore the government like most people, and have enough money to be at least in the middle class, I think Brazil is a really great place to live, and I say that having lived in various parts of the developed world.
I married a Brazilian, but I probably have some misinformed thoughts
Economic — I think it probably has the most potential of any country out there, except maybe India. A bit too protectionist, I don't understand why taxes on electronics are so expensive when Brazil doesn't produce them at home, as well as food being so expensive, or taxing cheap Chinese e-commerce sites when people don't have much money in the first place.
From what I hear the healthcare is amazing. My wife was shocked at how poor our healthcare system was compared to Brazil — apparently free, fast, high quality, thorough. For example, to see a GP here is sometimes a two week waiting list, on top of not being free, and of quite poor quality for a supposed first world country.
Political/Stability — It's a South American country, not much more to be said, corruption abound everywhere as well as bureaucracy (my father-in-law is waiting 5 years for an inheritance). And of course the country is shockingly dangerous
Entrepreneurship/Tech — One thing that amazed me in Brazil was the technology, I haven't been to the USA but in Europe it's at least a decade behind in terms of adoption of tech. From Pix, to NuBank, to iFood, Rappi, everyone adopting WhatsApp Business (no idea why this is barely used in Europe for small businesses). Maybe superficial examples but it highlights that entrepreneurship seems to be thriving there.
Education I have no idea, I suppose English should be focused more in schools since it opens lots of doors there