This was in reply to a question where the poster wanted to know why it is hard to find good Indian programmers who currently live in India. Someone who has stu

This was in reply to a question where the poster wanted to know why it is hard to find good Indian programmers who currently live in India. Someone who has studied in US does not really belong to the "Indian Programmer" set I was talking about here. If you read my comment elsewhere in the thread, I defended people working for non-SWITCH companies including google for bucking the trend. I know that the caliber of programmers working for Goog, Y!, MS, Adobe is much higher than the typical Indian programmer who aspires to a H1B visa, whose primary motivation for a US Visa is increased money and social status. I'm not painting everybody who is on H1B as bad. But if you consider that nearly 100,000 apply to H1B visas from India, it not hard to see that a vast majority are not of the same caliber as potential GOOG/MS/Y! employees. Well, I have worked in India for 8 years as a programmer and have interviewed dozens of potential employees to work for startup companies that I worked for AND I have had the opportunity to interact with a wide sample of H1Bs in the USA. I stand by my measure of "most programmers" even if it is anecdotal. And your paraphrasing "Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops don't care about technology" carries the same bias that you try to dispel. I personally know a lot of programmers who work/used to work for SWITCh companies while also being excellent hackers and FOSS contributors.