Please try not to jump to racism accusations immediately, it makes the world a worse place. It even goes directly against the rules here at HN, where you are instructed to take the best interpretation of someone’s comment.

To be conservative in my financial estimates, I made the assumption that chess.com's technical workforce is mostly made up of less accomplished developers, and, orthogonally, of those in areas with a low cost of living. If I said "bottom-of-the-barrel Silicon Valley devs", I would have estimated their costs 3x higher, but I wouldn't have become racist against Californians.

I personally have no trouble asserting that the worst Indian developers are worse than the worst American developers without making any claim about average quality. There is a large cohort of developers in India and other third world countries whose main exposure to programming concepts is poorly taught classes with sometimes hundreds of students to an instructor for instance. That kind of thing simply does not exist in that capacity in the west. Minimum wage laws and such are also a contributor here, people of such poor skill are simply not employable in the west because the price floor for employing someone is so much higher.

None of this has anything to do with race or ethnicity, only societal wealth and development inequalities.

It’s also true that some of the very best and brightest developers I’ve worked with have been Indian. Usually they are working for high salaries at famous companies, not for outsourcing firms. “Race” has nothing to do with it.

There’s nothing wrong with Bottom of the barrel. It’s describing the work done, not the nationality of the workers.

> the bottom of the barrel The cheapest, worst, or lowest quality. Used to describe an item in a range of comparable products. [0]

If all software companies were in a barrel West highest cost at the top and lowest cost at the bottom, even the worst quality local companies would be somewhere in the middle. They just can’t compete with the labour cost of overseas developers. If you’re looking for something to be produced at minimum cost, you’re literally looking for bottom-of-the-barrel.

It has nothing to do with racism. If India’s economy exploded overnight and the cost of labour went up 10,000%, North American businesses would look elsewhere. If American developers could be paid $3/hour tomorrow, we would hire those developers but still call any American writing code at that price “bottom of the barrel”.

[0]: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/bottom+of+the+barrel

I (not op) agree that the issue is with the offshoring structure and practices. My experience with offshoring is that the devs are given tasks without context and not allowed to make decisions at higher level, are thus unable to “own” a project beyond the micro tasks.

Also, often write code which is not cohesive with the whole, do not take (are not given) time to learn the appropriate APIs and do not communicate when confused.

For me this exposes structures that put people under pressure, punish mistakes and perceive questions as lack of experience.

This has little to do with ethnicity and much to do with colonialist thinking and exploitation.

Coding sweatshops cannot produce deep thinking and the level of ownership needed in a development partner.

> .. to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company?

Well people are mostly hired intentionally. Whether at top of the line and highest wages or bottom of the barrel lowest wages.

Also maybe you are not that familiar with India, you'd be surprised to know what are "lowest possible" wages in India instead of just lower wage by western standards.

With the cost of living in India being so much lower than in the US and even eastern Europe, Indian developers is probably the least expensive option for those who is looking for people who can actually code and speak decent English. No racism here, just unequal distribution of life standards.