For hiring a software engineer, given that Indian IT engineers are available at x (Indian bachelors) or 5x (Indian masters) does it make sense for a company to hire at 150x (American masters) given that all the three can work remotely?

For hiring a software engineer, given that Indian IT engineers are available at x (Indian bachelors) or 5x (Indian masters) does it make sense for a company to hire at 150x (American masters) given that all the three can work remotely?
Sorry, your numbers are way off, and you can't "add" programmers as if they're interchangeable.

"Cheap" developers in India and elsewhere are crap developers. There are a few things you can outsource to a developer who only makes $10/hour that won't completely be garbage when you get it back, but those same things can be done here in the US for roughly $25/hour. So we're already only at a 2.5x difference.

For the US developer you also don't have the 11.5 hour time zone difference so you can talk to the developer directly about questions that come up. With Indian developers, they'll often do eight hours of work on the wrong problem and then need to redo the work the next day after they get feedback. Repeat this 2-3 times and that 2.5x price difference suddenly doesn't seem so compelling.

So then we have the stronger developers. I'm not going to say "masters degree" developers, since a masters isn't actually highly correlated to their skill. Edit to add: And skill is a huge difference between developers! The best developers can accomplish things that average developers will simply never complete. As I've quoted elsewhere ,[1] "There is no number of ordinary eight-year-olds who can beat a grandmaster in chess."

In my experience, even in India that's $45-60/hour. In the US you're looking at $60-120/hour. Again, not that much of a difference.

And then there are cultural differences to deal with. Specifically, Americans are more comfortable, in broad generalities, being rude.

You see, when your client asks you to do something, and the client isn't being clear, the polite response might seem be to assure the client that you understand. Whereas a strong US developer will tell the client there's an ambiguity in what they just said, and will ask them to clarify.

Combine that with being in a nearby time zone so the questions don't need to wait for 24 hours to be answered, and finding someone local, or at least +/- 3 time zones, starts to seem pretty valuable.

Worth even a 2x higher wage, in fact.

No idea where 150x comes from. Someone interning in India for tasks scraps? Or comparing to the $1M salaries that a very few developers at Google somehow acquired…

Footnotes

[1] Tim Mensch's answer to Why would a company pay $120K/year for a programmer when they can get 10 outsourced programmers for the amount?

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