[eitally]

The problem, kamaal, is that to get reliably high quality software engineers and designers in India you actually do have to spend nearly what you'd be paying in most of the US (the whole country, excepting NYC, Boston, LA, Bay Area, Seattle, and a few other hot spots) and it's much more challenging to recruit than it is in the US. There are problems with candidates cross shopping offers, professional interviewees, horrendous private sector communications infrastructure, governmental dysfunction, inflation, sexism, and familial pressure to strive for ever-increasing job titles in household name companies.

I don't mean to say India doesn't make sense, and I employ about 225 folks in Chennai right now, but it is apples to oranges and decision makers do not often have the right data to make informed choices over where to hire. As an example of something completely removed from quality of personnel, the time difference can wreak havoc on its own, especially when the stakeholders and developers are in different hemispheres. This holds not just for the development process but also in post-deployment support. It naturally (and unfortunately) leads to situations where the one or two engineers in the same general location as the stakeholders end up usurping the responsibility from the remote staff just out of convenient and self-consciousness of the 1-2 day lag they've been burned by over and over again. I could write a book on this subject (I've gone from being an individual contributor developer to a senior director reporting to the CIO over the last 7yrs and have seen nearly everything), but let's not belabor it. The executive summary is that offshoring is hard and too many managers only look at it from a direct labor cost perspective, which is folly.

Yes, we live in a globalized world and it will only continue to shrink. At the point where everyone has a phone or tablet with wireless unfiltered gigabit internet everywhere they need it, we'll be in good shape.