[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...].