[koraybalci]

All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive..

I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?

[rgrieselhuber]

Even if such statistics existed, they wouldn't be that helpful because it pretty much comes down to how successful each company is when they outsource development work.

In my own experience, I've managed outsourced teams in China, Mexico, India and Argentina. While doing so, I've worked with some fabulous developers and also many not-so-fabulous developers. I've also hired more than my share of engineers in the US and the fabulous:not-so-fabulous ratio actually ended up being pretty similar.

The main thing that local developers have in their favor is they get to partake in the evolution of thought that takes place in any long term product strategy whereas remote developers don't have that advantage without the help of enlightened managers / dev teams.

The really good developers, however, wherever they are, are able to transcend even that challenge and contribute effectively to the product strategy. I've seen that happen in remote teams in all of the above countries and it's pretty cool to watch.

[mechanical_fish]

The main thing that local developers have in their favor is they get to partake in the evolution of thought that takes place in any long term product strategy...

Yep, that's it. It's not that the people are all that different. It's that a person twelve time zones away is a lot harder to communicate with than a person living next door. Especially if they're not from the same culture.

The cultural and distance barriers aren't impossible to overcome. But they are a handicap.

I used to work for a semiconductor company with a substantial factory in Malaysia. I'll never forget the first time I took the long, long flight to meet the engineers there. It was like removing a blindfold. You got into the factory with those folks and suddenly all their problems -- which had seemed so obscure over those damned conference calls -- became clear, and their personalities snapped into place, and you could start getting things done.

[michaelneale]

From my experience the cultural one is much worse then the distance one. Also timezone is another distance related factor - far away but similar timezone means more collaboration.

[huherto]

I am currently having a similar experience. I've assembled a young and talented software development team here in Mexico, but the rest of the company (sales, QA, production, etc) is in California. I do not think they are aware of the our capacities and we do not understand where they want us to go. I feel out of the creative process of the company, but we are the ones who actually have the skills (programming) to take it there. So we are stuck doing what we are told to do.

[russell]

My experience with several Indian teams at different companies bears out the article. They didn't have the same level of education that a developer gets at a good US engineering/CS school. It was more like at a JC level, a few months of Java then turned loose on the clients. The ones I worked with had several years of work experience, but not the depth of knowledge that one would expect from top notch locals. A lot of the savings was lost because we had to manage them more closely with a local liaison and daily code reviews.

OTOH I worked with a Ukrainian outsourcer that had very talented, well schooled, professional, and productive developers. They were also fairly expensive at $40/hour. Good, but not much cheaper.

[huherto]

Yea, that may be true. But I think most large companies in the U.S end up hiring average developers. Seems to me they have a hard time distinguishing who is talented and who is not. They also have a bureaucratic structure that does not allow the talented people to make the decisions and it becomes harder to retain the talented developers.

[pramodsub]

You probably worked with one of the big outsourcing body shops. The average developer anywhere in the world has a poor CS education, and this is the reason why Mr. Papadimoulis' site exists. I know folks who work for the Googles, Microsofts, Yahoos and the like in India and I find it hard to believe that the guys who write the JScript.NET compiler, or Windows Live Messenger don't have a CS degree. Clearly, you need to get over your bias.

Your $40 number seems grounded in reality though. I've never worked in the outsourcing business, but Ravi claims about $40 is what you need to pay for a good coder. [http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/05/faq-from-my-mail-box-1...].

[jimbokun]

"I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others?"

I would suggest it's more that the highly skilled developers in, say, India are not cheap enough to make the outsourcing worth it. Here's a WSJ article making that argument:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118342455118256110.html

"Last year, Mr. Shah paid his engineers in India about half of Silicon Valley levels. By early this year, it was 75%."

[alecco]

The seat value is usually as much as salary, if not more. I bet it still was less than 20% than in Silicon Valley (for sure at cost of social unrest and different infrastructure, but strictly money it is cheaper.)

[blasdel]

There's the idea that highly-skilled developers who get things done will end up in the first-world if they are born elsewhere.

[a-priori]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was uncomfortable with that assertion.