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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 a

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.

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.