Offshore Indian devs make sense when you can have a large Indian division so you can amortize communication infrastructure/process management over a lot of heads, and you're building for international customers so you're not paying an English -> X tax inherently.
Just recently I asked a dev there for a POC of a feature with decent specificity and ended up with about 8k LOC of spaghetti. I re-wrote it later in a few hundred. This is about in-line with my career experience.
I've had a few standout devs there but it does feel like a lot are putting in the bare minimum or are just working really far outside of their abilities.
And outsourcing certainly became a thing though not in the way everyone predicted. There are far more software engineers in the US today than there were in 2004.
I work for a global corporation. We have offices in India. For the technical professionals I deal with the wage differential is maybe 30-50% and is actually quite a bit less than the cost of living difference. My personal experience is that there is a tendency for them to massively inflate their qualifications and level of experience to a point that Americans would call fraud. The only kind of people who think this is a good idea are people like Larry Fink, and I would attribute his motives to greed and malice, probably an equal parts.
What evidence is there of the quality of Indian devs specifically?
One signal I'd expect to see, for example, would be success in programming competitions. Here's the list of winners of the IOI competition [1] - India has won 3 times.
Meanwhile, Turkey has won 4 times, Estonia has won 5 times, and Vietnam has won 22 times!
Why should we suspect that there are more or better developers in Indian than in any of the countries that has produced more winners??
[1] https://stats.ioinformatics.org/countries/?sort=medals_desc
That's true but irrelevant. Nothing is "the same" as anything else. My question was, what evidence is there that offshore Indian devs are of high quality. One expected signal with be ...that they demonstrate their programming skill.
> these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs
That's ridiculous!! You're claiming that Turkey, with a population of under a million, has "more people trying to use these competitions" than India, with a population in the billions????
> many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries
Okay, but the claim was, "offshore Indian devs are good" - that cohort (i.e. the ones INSIDE INDIA) excludes the cohort you're talking about (emigrate to higher-income contries).
So, unless your point is, "yes, I agree with you, there is no evidence that offshore (still in India) devs are of high quality, and the reason is that the good ones emigrated" I think this statement is irrelevant.
Not because all Indian devs are bad (this is of course absolutely not true), but most of the good ones are either no longer in India or working in India but for something more prestigious and interesting than an offshoring shop