[BuyMyBitcoins]

>”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]

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]

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