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I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end

by whack 10y ago

I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.

mhotchen 10y ago
Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
JamesBarney 10y ago
My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.

by whack 10y ago

mhotchen 10y ago

Yeah these definitely weren't top tier developers. Even so I was happy with the quality of the code on the two we retained, it was everything that goes around it that I struggled with. For example they wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.

JamesBarney 10y ago

My understanding though is that if you're restricting yourself to top developers in India you should expect to be paying 40-80k(and rising) assuming you directly hired them. And this doesn't include setting up all of the infrastructure to hire overseas, not to mention the increased risk of operating out of two legal jurisdictions, timezone differences, and culture gaps.