You can find "engineers" in India who'll accept $6k / year. But, with a few exceptions, most of these $6k/year engineers are really quite terrible at what they

You can find "engineers" in India who'll accept $6k / year. But, with a few exceptions, most of these $6k/year engineers are really quite terrible at what they do, and their English communication skills are...to put it lightly... not good. I've dealt with a contractor who hired such engineers. I remember the team, which I think had around 10 people (but I don't recall the exact size). There was 1 guy, who was basically a 10X engineer, and pulled the weight of most of his team/division. He wrote/delivered most of the working code, while there were around 9 others on his team who contributed very little (mostly terribly buggy code which he had to fix). Yea, they were paying each person on the team $6k (the manager–who was pretty much useless -- was probably earning like $12k), and they were spending around $60k to $70k in total on this 10-person team. But–they could have pretty much just fired the entire team except for the one guy who was producing most of the code, and gotten the same (or better results). He would've been happier, and he wouldn't been dragged down by all those other nearly-non-contributing folks. (For what it was worth, I talked to this guy (who was from Rajasthan), and suggested that he find a better job that paid better and valued his skills better. And I even offered to recommend him, and help him find a job abroad with a company that'd sponsor a visa for him; but he turned down my offer–he was actually, quite bizarrely, worried about some form of retaliation, if he left that contractor/team. It was strange indeed...) Of course, if you want to find a software engineer in India who can actually deliver results (and communicate well in English), you should be willing to pay them at least $60k USD (INR 50 lakh) / year. Any less, and you'll basically "get what you pay for" unless you luck out and land some talented engineer who doesn't know his skills' worth. Fwiw, $60k USD is still a quite cheaper than the US (a 50% discount), since I'd say in the US, the bare minimum for a software engineer today stands at around $120k USD.