[richmarr]

> I think there's a fundamental flaw in the idea that you can just pay for cheaper labor- as Steve Jobs has said before the difference in a good programmer and an outstanding programmer can be 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 you can't capture that by trying to cut your cost from $100 an hour to $20 an hour.

Perhaps you left something out, but the argument that high quality programmers have to be expensive might be interpreted as assuming that high quality programmers only exist within high-salary countries like the USA. I assume you didn't mean it that way.

[sheepmullet]

1) High end developers get paid a lot. Even in India and Russia.

2) As a rule of thumb consulting companies charge out at 3x wages.

It usually is more expensive to outsource to the top end than it is to do it in house even in Seattle or SF.

[richmarr]

> 1) High end developers get paid a lot. Even in India and Russia.

> 2) As a rule of thumb consulting companies charge out at 3x wages.

This is backwards.

1) Consulting companies charge what they can get, which depends on what markets they've managed to penetrate, reputation, contract flow, etc as some markets are far better lubricated than others.

2) High end developers get paid a function of company budget and supply of talent, so in locations where budgets are more constrained, salaries will also be constrained. Your implication that "paid a lot" is a constant or near-constant is questionable.

There are lots of different datasets on this, no doubt none of them high enough quality, but they all indicate huge discrepancies, both on average and when stratified.

https://www.daxx.com/article/it-salaries-software-developer-...

Is it possible to make a 100:20 saving as the parent comment questioned? I don't know. Perhaps not. On the other hand US average programmer salary is over 4x the average programmer salary in China, so under the right circumstances it's not as ludicrous as perhaps presented.

I guess my point is that your premise that "high-end" developer salaries are near-constant around the globe is likely only true if you constrain yourseld to developers who are employed at agencies that compete globally against companies like Thoughtworks and have employed there long enough to have established seniority (remember experience is not synonymous with quality). That's quite a tight definition of "high end" in my opinion.

[sheepmullet]

> That's quite a tight definition of "high end" in my opinion.

High end always has to be in context. The current context is wage competition against US developers.

The open source dev working for free isn't in this market even if they are the best developer in the world.

My friends in India working for Microsoft and the ones working remote for $30/hr are in the same market.

> Consulting companies charge what they can get

3x is a rule of thumb. Charge much less than 3x and you aren't making money unless you have a much lower than average cost structure.

> On the other hand US average programmer salary is over 4x the average programmer salary in China, so under the right circumstances it's not as ludicrous as perhaps presented.

You are comparing apples and oranges.

Remember average in the US is average after a couple of decades of outsourcing.