Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with internation

Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with international clients, so I get to take calls from customers (often IT teams for large clients) from all over the globe. To use India as the chosen example, I've worked with teams that could out-engineer me on a good day, that clearly knew what they were doing. I've also worked with teams that, possibly due to language barrier issues, could barely comprehend their own code base, much less anything I was attempting to help them troubleshoot. To be quite honest though, I could remove "India" from that equation entirely, because I've worked with many US "technical contacts" that, despite speaking perfect English, lack even the most basic technical skills. The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem. I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.