It's not super nice of you to automatically assume that cheap(er) devs in cheaper locations like Colombia or Philippines are bad, or at least inferior to more expensive ones.

Of course they aren't, you'll have good and bad devs in expensive and cheap locales alike. There might be language or cultural barriers that make collaboration across country lines, but that's pretty much it.

>Note regarding ___location: This is a remote position within Colombia only. This position is only open to people living in Colombia.

I've never seen anything like this before. What's the reason for hiring this way?

If all their jobs were in Colombia, I'd assume that there's something legally that makes it hard for them to hire internationally, but they have roles lots of roles in the Philippines and a few roles elsewhere, so I'm stumped.

It's very very very common. Look at "Who's hiring?" threads - most roles are "Remote/US".

Companies do it mostly due to timezone and beurocratic reasons (they can't pay salary/tax abroad).

I'm pretty sure it's a timezone thing. Devs in Colombia are working at the same as the devs in the states or Canada.

*Colombia

And it may be too harsh to judge a whole country and its talent just because a company whose servers are down hire talent there. What about the AWS engineers in those countries? Or Airbnb, Stripe, Twilio, etc?

I'm seriously considering moving to Colombia, nice. Unfortunate that it's remote.