The good developers in developing nations are still going to charge more than $15 an hour. They tend to be more in the range of $40-$50. The $15 an hour guys

The good developers in developing nations are still going to charge more than $15 an hour. They tend to be more in the range of $40-$50. The $15 an hour guys in my experience are either: 1. good (quality-wise), but slow and don't speak much English, 2. or they are just horrible. I have seen two projects coming out of the $15 an hour shops. The only way to have a sustainable product is to start over. The sad part is that I have also seen a lot of people throw a significant amount of money at these $15 an hour deals when they could have created a better product for the same amount of money with fewer high end devs. One of my favorite outsourcing stories was when a guy wanted me to be his CTO and he was considering hiring a company that outsourced to China at $15 an hour. So I asked the outsourcing company if I could interact with the devs directly. Their answer was no, claiming that it was for everyone's protection. I won't even get into them describing a waterfall methodology and telling me that this is Agile. Let's just say that we didn't use these guys. The bigger issue here is this. If you are doing a tech play and can't code, don't have a technical founder, and don't have the cash to hire good people should you even be playing in this space? I'm sure that there are a few exceptions that are able to do this, but that seems to be few and far between. If you don't have a deep passion and understanding of your core business, which in a tech play means the tech to execute it, along with the market that you are going after......or gobs of cash to bring in the right ones I'll bet you there are some great stats on how successful they are. I know what my anecdotal experience is but would love to see some hard data to confirm or deny my experience.