The complaints you hear about Indian developers are for the $500/month developers.
The developers you can hire in India for $1,000 to $2,000 are competent and comparable with $120k to $150k US developers. These developers work with the modern frameworks and write beautiful code.
Companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo and successful Indian startups pay upwards of $2,000/mo to great developers.
We have a small team in India and we pay $500 to $1,000 for off-site SEOs and $1,500 to $2,500 to developers.
My comment above goes into more detail but if you want the best Indian software engineers, you need to pay them more than another company would (just like in any other free market in the world). This is a constantly moving target.
Yes, isn't that possible with direct hiring instead of paying more to go through outsourcing firms? My understanding is that roughly $500 monthly puts an Indian in the middle class. Double that and I figure we would be really attractive to young, entry level programmers.
Those outsourcing firms usually pay between $300 to $1,000 to developers. They usually hire bad programmers who do not understand fundamentals and write spaghetti code from an ancient era.
This salary isn't attractive to good programmers any more.
Maybe not in America but India's different and remember, smart phones made in third world countries have different markups since manufacturing is cheap and nearby.
The developers you can hire in India for $1,000 to $2,000 are competent and comparable with $120k to $150k US developers. These developers work with the modern frameworks and write beautiful code.
Companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo and successful Indian startups pay upwards of $2,000/mo to great developers.
We have a small team in India and we pay $500 to $1,000 for off-site SEOs and $1,500 to $2,500 to developers.