Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...
So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.
Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over.
He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then.
I see not much has changed.
As far as I understand, there's extreme variance between highest-tier and lowest-tier universities and it's not necessarily reflected in salaries when they're hired by Western companies.
YMMV
https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-d...
https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-i...
etc..
There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!
India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.
Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country.
https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer...
When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues.
That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India.
You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India.
Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.
>70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself.
Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.
It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.
Local salaries might even be slightly lower, because you get to hold h1bs prisoner (an added benefit.)
No it doesn't, not materially anyway. Stats can be misleading if you don't pay attention. A lot of the big corps started hiring H1-B in large numbers long ago but since H1-Bs can't easily switch jobs and tend to suck up to higher-ups, soon their mid-management was occupied by H1-Bs.
Anybody who has tried to find a job in such an environment knows the drill - Indian managers hire only Indians and prefer H1-Bs to keep them docile. Salary isn't a consideration there, but it all starts with "cheap" and is sustained by ethnic loyalty and fear of the outsider.
In smaller companies where hiring is more natural, H1-Bs are still payed less and their inability to switch jobs makes them cheaper still.
Same bias happened when manufacturing moved to China. However, no whining on HN since at the time, blue-collar American red-necks were getting their just deserts.