Offshore R&D to India, everyone else is

Had the same experience

I just finished helping ABN AMRO sell itself to Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland. Both banks rely heavily on Infosys developers in India.

The impenetrable accents, the horrible phone lines, the lack of basic computer skills, all pushed every project's completion date later and later and later.

And the resource churn was insane. We would take about 60 days to get Infosys people trained to do their jobs, and then 30 days later, a whole new crew would show up with blank stares and no turnover documents from the previous crew. In the past 3 years my team has trained more than 12 complete sets of Infosys developers how to do basic IT work. I often wonder where they get their people -- do they pull them off of farms, or something? The questions I used to get were just insane. How do I ping? How do I telnet? How do I FTP? How do I write a shell script? Or better yet, my all-time favorite -- you have to write JCL for me, you have to write a shell script for me, etc. etc.

Just insane.

I'm not particularly worried

Put frankly, another way of reading this is that India's days are numbered....in very small numbers - read 5-6.

If salaries are exploding at 10-15 (or 16.2%) per year, you reach something like parity in about 5 years.

At which point , the previously mentioned logistical and managerial overhead becomes a negative factor.

Coupled with the significant national disinterest I suspect the serious R&D will stay right where it is.

I've worked with dozens of offshoring and overseas initiatives and there is another factor that's - not mentioned and is directly related to the increasing salary problem.

Skillset devaluation, multi-skill employees already command premium salaries both here and there, so the R&D tech that is at 44k is already undervalued - even for India.

The broad trend in management - in both China and India is to purposefully pigeonhole staff, keeping breadth of skills minimized, constraining resources so individuals CAN'T command better salaries, this delays the inevitable but causes and obvious host of problems.

For my money, and anyone else seeking a career in the IT field, it's both a rewarding and worthwhile career choice, but your skills must be up to date and you will always be re-learning material every few years. While that is a challenge, the upside is that your chosen career will always be in demand.