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Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking of moving to India to do IT development for my company [1]

> There are some brilliant Indian programmers too. You probably wont ever outsource to them because they are expensive.

I would love to know: What is approximate salary of a brilliant programmer in India with, say, 10 years experience? What about the cost of hiring a brilliant graduate? What would these salaries be as a percentage of the corresponding United States programmer?

> Working at a small firm is very low prestige, unlike here. You want to have a big name you can tell to your prospective father-in-law.

How much extra would a small startup have to pay to attract brilliant programmers, compared to a Google or Microsoft?

[1] More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308482)

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>>What is approximate salary of a brilliant programmer in India with, say, 10 years experience?

That's pretty much a range. Anything that starts around 15 Lacs PA to 20 Lacs PA. But don't give into demands so easily. I would suggest you never even bother to hire job hoppers, which are super common here.

Look for- strong inclination for curiosity, past projects, and their interest in picking up good technical projects.

By and large the prices are a little lesser than that you would be pay to a 'Good' US programmer(I'm assuming bad programmers are everywhere).

Though being an Indian and staying in Bangalore. I would suggest you better try to get people from UK first and start up there. Regarding India operations, well these days you can't really be out of India and China(at least if you want a long term successful business). But that is for later. Start up in your own country first. You don't want to be dealing with other surprises when your company is so young.

15 Lacs PA to 20 Lacs PA = $24k - $32k per year

Interesting, is that before or after taxes?

That's quite a lot than the range you would have to pay for a Software Engineer in Mexico, which goes between $18K and $27K (gross).

I guess that's why more and more USA companies choose to outsource to Mexico, to take advantage of the closer time-zones and somewhat more familiar culture.

That would be before taxes. The reason why good Indian developers command a 20-25 lakh INR per annum in salary is in part due to the income tax. Indian income tax mandate swallows upto 30% of income from people who have an income exceeding 10 lakh INR pa. (=> effectively, it's only around 70-80% of whatever salary they get would be available to them).

I did not know that salaries in Mexico are in the range of 18K-27K USD pa; that sounds like a better deal for US based companies.

BTW, one should note that the major Indian outsourcing service providers (a.k.a the big three - TCS, Infy, Wipro) are already in Mexico.

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