Do those people really believe they're the most intellectually superior to the rest of the world? If a job can be done purely remotely, what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?
* lied about their capabilities/experience to get the job,
* failed to grok requirements through the language barrier,
* were unable to fix critical bugs in their own code base,
* committed buggy chatgpt output verbatim,
* and could not be held liable because their firm is effectively beyond the reach of the US legal system.
In a couple of projects I've seen a single US based developer replace an entire offshore team, deliver a superior result, and provide management with a much more responsive communication loop, in 1% of the billable hours. The difference in value is so stark that one client even fired the VP who'd lead the offshoring boondoggle.
Software talent is simply not as fungible as some MBAs would like to believe.
Now, I am not a software developer but in high school, but I have my brother/cousins working in the software dev industry and here are my thoughts.
>language barrier: I genuinely don't know how incompetent developers you can hire, I mean sure if you hire extremely shitty developers but even that's rare.
Most people here are comfortable enough with english, in the sense that literally anyone can speak english & mostly get the point across. Yes, I have heard of some misarrangements but I don't think that its really much of an issue.
Now some outsourcing companies are mass recruiters who recruit tech from Cs colleges where noone recruited them (Tata consultancy services, infosys?) and the thing with them is that they don't even pay the mediocre expectations of a developer even in INDIA, they are basically exploiting junior developers and are compared with govt. insitutions in my country given how slow they are.
My brother works in a decent Consultancy services but he says that there are a lot of inefficiencies in the system.
He worked on a project and we estimated and he got 1% or less than 1% of the work that he MOSTLY did. and so my brother has way more incentive to freelance and get a "remote job" not consultancy.
I think that you confused yourself with remote job and consultancy part. Remote jobs hiring / freelancing indians is still cheaper than a consultancy imo who are parasites on the developers.
My brother works in a consultancy right now because the job market is shitty and he has gotten offers 4x his current salary from countries like switzerland and america. Yet, my family doesn't want him to do the 4x income work because he is already working a job and they don't want him to burn out
And they don't want him to leave the job because its "safe", you can't trust these startups etc. given the volatile nature and if they fail, then whoops the job market is really messed up right now, even in India and also arrange marriage is a huge thing and the girl's family usually checks the company that the boy works in and they usually get fishy if its remote job (and I mean, for good reason)
Also trust me some indians can definitely work in american timezones too but that is a little tough. But I mean, we are okay if you might call us once or twice late at night when its day in america and you have something really urgent. Atleast I am okay with that.
And you could pay 2x the salary the normal indian dev gets and I feel like even that would be less than an american dev. This can really filter some devs to get those with seniority or good projects.
Its a problem of incentives for consultancies (which is what you seem to hate) and maybe that's a bit fair given how much inefficiencies I see in that system. Just remote hire directly (I suppose)