India's Leading Export: CEOs
time.com
time.com
The bottom line is these people speak English and are perceived to be able to bridge the gap between the East and West.
I'd expect Brazilians to also do quite well, as they tend to have pretty good English.
For excellence in sports, particularly at the olympic level, you need training facilities, budgets and infrastructure in the country. You will find that India is sorely looking in these!
I do not see what the ethnicity of these people has to do with their success. I think more credit should be due to the organisations who hired and supported them up the career ladder.
Although statistically, Indians should have a few smart people anyways, the number of CEOs the nation exports is disproportionately high in comparison to other countries.
Also, how is population related to this ? Europe also has a population of about 850 million - how many CEOs has Europe produced ? I mention Europe because it's the closest in comparison to India in terms of population diversity.
Of course don't forget the cost of living is cheaper there so even the good ones can work for lower payment than in US.
Fortune 500 companies are not in the market for $50 a week labor from individuals. (They may well be hiring it, somewhere down the food chain, but it will be balled up with 800 similarly situated individuals for a $XX million a year contract.)
Why don't I do it with a $50 a week freelancer?
1) I don't trust him, at all. If he could implement payroll systems, why isn't he charging millions of dollars? He's probably copy/pasting "Yes no problem sir I will implement your system to the specified requirements" to 30 jobs a day and looking for a sucker.
2) Who is going to manage him? Me? If I have to manage him, he doesn't cost $50 a week, he costs ~$8,050 a week, because I'm the VP of a major bank unit. Talking to poor people is always a bad use of my time, because it competes with talking to rich people. (This is somewhat exaggerated but not false.)
3) Payroll systems are not a one-man job. After you get to team sizes of 20+, it really helps to have a system for recruiting/managing/etc them, so that you don't have to. I mean, at 20+, someone is statistically going to be getting married or quitting or dying every year. Do I want to deal with that? No. Let their boss deal with it.
4) If I pay an Indian freelancer $50 a week to make my payroll system, and the payroll system fails to ship on-time, I will lose my job because I did something which was freaking insane. There are things which, in American business, are insane, and there are things which are Known To Be Not Insane. Paying large, established technology consultancies millions of dollars is Known To Be Not Insane. Even if the project fails, it is not your fault, it is their fault. If the $50 a week Indian turns out to not be God's gift to programming, hiring him was definitely your fault.
It gets more complicated, but this hits some of the high notes.
When the Fortune 500 outsources to one of the bigger outsourcing firms like those you mentioned, they're outsourcing the whole process of developing software from requirements gathering to testing and the final output is not just working software, but a full trail of documentation for accountability.
You're not getting that from rent-a-coder.
EDIT: http://www.haygroup.com/ww/Downloads/Details.aspx?ID=1187
This links to a white paper that I think is the one referred to in the article but you have to sign up to get it.
P.S. Part of my ethnicity is Indian..
P.S.: It depends on a big load of factors!
I doubt it...