6 ms·

Actual Indians, as always. Humans are cheaper, and have the capacity for long term memory formation.

random9749832 11mo ago
I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-to-india/ https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...
- Arch485 11mo ago
  It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
  - random9749832 11mo ago
    Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/really_bad_luck_with_indian_interviewers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...
  - alecco 11mo ago
    They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 11mo ago
    >”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.” Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating. Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
    - burningChrome 11mo ago
      At least you got to interview them. One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over. He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then. I see not much has changed.
    - Yoric 11mo ago
      On the other hand, I've had extremely skilled senior Indian colleagues who were essentially paid like juniors. As far as I understand, there's extreme variance between highest-tier and lowest-tier universities and it's not necessarily reflected in salaries when they're hired by Western companies. YMMV
  - spixy 11mo ago
    Yes it is also racism, and tribalism - between Indian castes. https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-discrimination-problem https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-d... https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-in-favor-of-indian-workers https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-i... etc..
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers speak for themselves. Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country. https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developers-by-country-in-the-world-2023-by-github-data-player/ https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer... When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues. That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India. You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India. Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.
  - random9749832 11mo ago
    Here you go, h1b hires still get paid American salaries so that throws the whole 'they get hired because they are cheap' argument out of the window: https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-trump-h1b-visa-fees-100k-increase/ https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-tru... >70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself. Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.
    - zbentley 11mo ago
      Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B hiring.
      - random9749832 11mo ago
        I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'. It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third generation folks in executive office all over. As a political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as well in many states. There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
  - tuveson 11mo ago
    > There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies. Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!
    - lazide 11mo ago
      Yup, India is geopolitically right in the middle - and enjoying it.
    - Spooky23 11mo ago
      Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and logically. Notice Trump’s big crackdown barely made a dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are on the phone immediately… finance depends on the outsourcers onshore and offshore to function. India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.
alephnerd 11mo ago
GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well. Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async. If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a short term bid to compete against bootcamps. If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.
- alecco 11mo ago
  Are they investing tens of billions in new offices in those non-Indian countries? My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014
  - alephnerd 11mo ago
    Yes. (Still in process of generating the list) Poland [0][8] Ireland [1][2] Czechia [3][4] Canada [5][6] Turkiye [7] The expansion of Indian offices is a result of the reverse brain drain that accelerated during the early COVID layoffs along with the EB1/2 backlogs - a number of Staff and above Engineers, EMs and above, and Sr PMs and above who were on work visas were either cut or given the option to relocate to India and start a hub office. A similar trend happened in other countries, but India being so large means they get overshadowed. [0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions-in-polands-digital-future https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions... [1] - https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-6-20-amd-announces-plan-to-invest-135-million-to-expan.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-6-20-amd... [2] - https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news/2022/may/2022_05_24.html https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news... [3] - https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-announces-major-european-r-and-d-expansion https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-announces-major... [4] - https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-announcements/en/onsemi-selects-the-czech-republic-to-establish-end-to-end-silicon-carbide-production-for-advanced-power-semiconductors https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-announcement... [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-tech-hub-deepening-push-beyond-us-market-2025-10-16/ https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-tech-hub-... [6] - https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-toronto-office-expansion-vancouver-tower-opening/ https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-toronto-offic... [7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-invest-200-mln-turkey-technology-centre-ministry-says-2025-10-31/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-invest-200-ml... [8] - https://news.microsoft.com/pl-pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announces-a-pln-2-8-billion-investment-in-cloud-and-ai-infrastructure-skilling-and-cybersecurity-in-poland/ https://news.microsoft.com/pl-pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announ...
lazide 11mo ago
The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks who actually know things spend all their time selling new customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved out of the actual dev teams. It’s genius, in a way.
- luckylion 11mo ago
  This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that promise to have all the people you need and can either do entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers, QA, project managers etc on short notice. They have a few very competent developers who are primarily in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales contact is between non-technical management and their front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the second sales contact, technical staff from the potential client is involved and they bring along their real developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the project. They'll give you interviews with the developers you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't touch type and develop purely by trial and error without forming a mental model. If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to them. At some point even a junior developer is better than not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that and they'll get replaced first.
m-ee 11mo ago
The long term part is overstated in my experience. People move around a lot at these offshoring firms as better opportunities arise. In my experience by the time you find someone competent they’re already interviewing for a better role. Constant churn trying to find the next one.

I would say it is more sinister than just a cost-benefit analysis and plain racism in hiring. Cheap talent exists in far more places than India but somehow it almost always is India. Not only that but I have seen the strangest LinkedIn profiles where people graduate from no-name Indian universities and get a big-corp job here in the West like it is nothing. Even Japan has become pro-Indian on immigration for tech: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-to-india/ https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/06/takaichis-japan-looks-t... Wtf...

Arch485 11mo ago
It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons). So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
- random9749832 11mo ago
  Tons of anecdotes like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/really_bad_luck_with_indian_interviewers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1eblg0d/rea...
- alecco 11mo ago
  They bait-and-switch like hell. Once the original workers are out of the picture they squeeze the contract like a lemon. The managers involved won't re-hire and more often than not will even hide the mess (for their own sake). The old IBM playbook on steroids.
- BuyMyBitcoins 11mo ago
  >”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.” Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating. Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
  - burningChrome 11mo ago
    At least you got to interview them. One of the first startups I worked at in the early aughts, I started as a front-end dev. Indian dude a few cubes over. I'm not kidding, he had a "Learn .Net Nuke" Wrox book he was constantly pouring over. He was gone on my second day. Apparently the company had hired an outside recruiter who interviewed someone and when they got the job, this dude showed up. Apparently this was a really common scam back then. I see not much has changed.
  - Yoric 11mo ago
    On the other hand, I've had extremely skilled senior Indian colleagues who were essentially paid like juniors. As far as I understand, there's extreme variance between highest-tier and lowest-tier universities and it's not necessarily reflected in salaries when they're hired by Western companies. YMMV
- spixy 11mo ago
  Yes it is also racism, and tribalism - between Indian castes. https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-discrimination-problem https://www.vice.com/en/article/silicon-valley-has-a-caste-d... https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-in-favor-of-indian-workers https://wol.iza.org/news/tech-giant-accused-of-hiring-bias-i... etc..
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
No conspiracy theories are necessary here. The numbers speak for themselves. Here is an article putting together data from GitHub about SW developers per country. https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developers-by-country-in-the-world-2023-by-github-data-player/ https://data-player.com/highest-number-of-software-developer... When talking about outsourcing jobs from the U.S., you’re obviously gonna exclude the U.S. China is also not a factor. Neither are Western European countries or countries like Japan and S Korea because of relatively high salaries. Russia is out due to long standing geopolitical issues. That basically leaves Brazil and Indonesia as the only alternatives to India in the top 10 and combined they don’t even have half the number of SW developers as India. You need to then add Mexico, Vietnam, Turkey, Philippines and Poland to the above 3 to add up to the number of SW developers present in India. Thats why the outsourcing industry is concentrated in India. You can setup 1 office in India and have access to as many SW developers (Indians are also very willing to migrate domestically, so an office in a single city is sufficient to cater to the entire domestic developer market) as you would if you setup 8 offices in & different countries across 4 continents.
- random9749832 11mo ago
  Here you go, h1b hires still get paid American salaries so that throws the whole 'they get hired because they are cheap' argument out of the window: https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-trump-h1b-visa-fees-100k-increase/ https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-tru... >70% is a pretty insane number that certainly speaks for itself. Also, when you start giving a lot of tech jobs to people from one specific country, then the github developer numbers will naturally reflect that.
  - zbentley 11mo ago
    Grandparent was referring to outsourcing, not H-1B hiring.
    - random9749832 11mo ago
      I am talking about bias in hiring in general. I am responding that the bias in hiring towards this one country goes beyond that it is 'cheap'. It is easy to make the 'cheap' argument when you talk about outsourcing but it no longer makes sense when you look at h1b numbers.
Spooky23 11mo ago
The Indian diaspora is huge and you have second and third generation folks in executive office all over. As a political force, south Asians are increasingly powerful as well in many states. There’s a lot of opportunities for personal networks, nepotism and plain old corruption to work. (Who is going to figure out that somebody dropped a few gold coins to your sibling as a kickback?) There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies.
- tuveson 11mo ago
  > There’s a much smaller network of people with relationships to Eastern European or other companies. Unlike eastern Europe, India is geopolitically in a pretty good spot right now, having decent relations with most developed countries, and not engaged in any major wars with its neighbors. The last company I worked for outsourced a lot of work to Russia. At a certain time in 2022 they suddenly had to shift a lot of that work to... India!
  - lazide 11mo ago
    Yup, India is geopolitically right in the middle - and enjoying it.
  - Spooky23 11mo ago
    Absolutely. They are in the middle both physically and logically. Notice Trump’s big crackdown barely made a dent - mess with India, and Jamie Dimon and his peers are on the phone immediately… finance depends on the outsourcers onshore and offshore to function. India’s long term positioning of neutrality and strategy with business, education and politics is bearing fruit.

alephnerd 11mo ago

GCCs are expanding in Canada, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, and Costa Rica as well. Indians are more visible, but salary expections have gotten extremely out of whack in the US, and extended WFH during COVID proved to most boards that companies can continue to operate when entire teams are communicating async. If a large portion of interns and NCGs in the US are essentially expecting $45-70/hr salaries, it just isn't sustainable especially when factoring the growing skills deficit because universities failed CS students to a certain degree over the past 10 years by watering down programs in a short term bid to compete against bootcamps. If we are paying Bay Area salaries, we expect performance comensurate to that salary. Basically, all companies are now starting to adopt the Netflix model of hiring in the US.

alecco 11mo ago
Are they investing tens of billions in new offices in those non-Indian countries? My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45867014
- alephnerd 11mo ago
  Yes. (Still in process of generating the list) Poland [0][8] Ireland [1][2] Czechia [3][4] Canada [5][6] Turkiye [7] The expansion of Indian offices is a result of the reverse brain drain that accelerated during the early COVID layoffs along with the EB1/2 backlogs - a number of Staff and above Engineers, EMs and above, and Sr PMs and above who were on work visas were either cut or given the option to relocate to India and start a hub office. A similar trend happened in other countries, but India being so large means they get overshadowed. [0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions-in-polands-digital-future https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions... [1] - https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-6-20-amd-announces-plan-to-invest-135-million-to-expan.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-6-20-amd... [2] - https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news/2022/may/2022_05_24.html https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/news-and-events/department-news... [3] - https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-announces-major-european-r-and-d-expansion https://www.itpro.com/business/cato-networks-announces-major... [4] - https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-announcements/en/onsemi-selects-the-czech-republic-to-establish-end-to-end-silicon-carbide-production-for-advanced-power-semiconductors https://www.onsemi.com/company/news-media/press-announcement... [5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-tech-hub-deepening-push-beyond-us-market-2025-10-16/ https://www.reuters.com/business/lyft-open-toronto-tech-hub-... [6] - https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-toronto-office-expansion-vancouver-tower-opening/ https://www.connectcre.ca/stories/amazon-plans-toronto-offic... [7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-invest-200-mln-turkey-technology-centre-ministry-says-2025-10-31/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/uber-invest-200-ml... [8] - https://news.microsoft.com/pl-pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announces-a-pln-2-8-billion-investment-in-cloud-and-ai-infrastructure-skilling-and-cybersecurity-in-poland/ https://news.microsoft.com/pl-pl/2025/02/17/microsoft-announ...

lazide 11mo ago

The way the outsourced companies are structured, the folks who actually know things spend all their time selling new customers/placating existing customers. The moment someone shows promise/that they are actually skilled, they get moved out of the actual dev teams. It’s genius, in a way.

luckylion 11mo ago
This is the same on a lot of larger staffing agencies that promise to have all the people you need and can either do entire projects for you, or get you developers, designers, QA, project managers etc on short notice. They have a few very competent developers who are primarily in the secondary sales in my experience. First sales contact is between non-technical management and their front-line sales (usually very attractive women). In the second sales contact, technical staff from the potential client is involved and they bring along their real developers. But those are not the ones you'll get on the project. They'll give you interviews with the developers you can get, and they're coached for the interviews and sound fine. But then in reality they are people who can't touch type and develop purely by trial and error without forming a mental model. If hiring locally wasn't such a mess, nobody would talk to them. At some point even a junior developer is better than not having a developer at all. I assume AI will change that and they'll get replaced first.

m-ee 11mo ago

The long term part is overstated in my experience. People move around a lot at these offshoring firms as better opportunities arise. In my experience by the time you find someone competent they’re already interviewing for a better role. Constant churn trying to find the next one.