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Comment by rocknor | Hacker News Reader

This generalization that happens every time "outsourcing" and "India" get mentioned in the same thread needs to stop. The culprit here is your employer who is probably hiring graduates in India at 5-10% of SV salaries, while to get competent graduates you need like 20-25%. So you can still outsource for cheap labor, but don't make the mistake of being too cheap.

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My experience is western europe, smaller cities. For 25% of SV salaries you get close enough to the local salaries. Add a language barrier (we dont speak English), a time zone barrier (I like my meetings between 8:00 and 17:00 local time), and a cultural barrier, and its simply not worth the hassle.

Outsourcing for talent is fine, but there is plenty of competition to make India rare, at least around here. So when I hear India, it's unfortunately a pretty safe assumption that someone went for bottom of the barrel cheap.

I'm not saying this is right or fair.

Disagree. Let's assume 25% of a graduate SV salary is $25k. That's €20k. With this salary you can only hire bottom of the barrel graduates in Portugal (cheapest country in western europe) since most graduates leave to other EU countries. With that money, in India you can get many more graduates with good English proficiency from world-class universities that are extremely hard to get into. Plus cultural barrier is overrated, if there is a barrier it's only disappearing in this internet era.

Ok, counterpoint again.

The support contract for a huge multinational I was a small part of a while back, was bought out by an Indian-based company, who wanted the prestige and new line of business, but bit off WAY more than they could chew, and threw the entire tier 1/2/3 process into near chaos.

Had they looked even a little deeper, they might have realized that they had no pratical experience in customer facing sw/hw support, and saved everyone two years of flailing, panic-driven, blame-everyone-you-can-point-a-finger-at, the-technicians-are-wrong-since-our-process-says-otherwise-oh-wait-our-process-is-shit-what-now-MORE-METRICS unbelieveable bullshit.

All because somebody in high level management managed to bend somebodys ear, and the parent company got swindled into it.

So glad to be gone.

This does not counter what I said in any way.

It is still true that the very best of India is suctioned into the United States- though there is definitely some backflow as they gather enough capital to go back and invest in Indian based companies.

The gravity of magnitudes better compensation insures that the very best will migrate.

FAANG level engineers are completely insulated from overseas competition due to this, but of course the lower echelons will have to worry about this if the current demand spike falls off.

I would expect that if software programmers were of similar quality they would produce similar per capita software products, companies, and open source projects. But it’s not nearly as common.

I think the best programmers in the world get sucked into US companies so while there are decent programmers around the world, the quality isn’t the same. Whether it’s 5 or 25%, I don’t think there’s quality parity.

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