[DanielHB]

Coming from one of those countries where a lot of engineering gets offshored to, the best and brightest engineers in those countries DO have options (no, not just immigrating to a rich country) and won't be a code monkey for multinationals.

I have been to IBM offices in São Paulo a few times and let me just say, although they paid reasonably okay salaries it wasn't the first choice of work for most engineers...

And that is on top of the problems you are describing.