US programmers now willing to work at Indian-level salaries, says BW column
According to a column in BusinessWeek, when Jon Carson, founder of cMarket, recently felt an urgent need for four programmers, he asked his IT director to call an offshore software service intermediary. The intermediary came back with the number for the services from India: $40,000 per programmer--compared to the $85,000-90,000 a year required to hire experienced American programmers.
But since Carson was "personally very uncomfortable" in sending the jobs overseas, he decided to offer the jobs to Americans--at the same rate he would be paying for Indian programmers. He placed some ads in The Boston Globe, offering full-time contract programming work for $45,000 annually. (He had decided that it was worth adding a $5,000 premium to what he'd pay the Indian workers in exchange for having the programmers on site.)
The result? About 90 resumes "flooded in", many from highly qualified programmers having trouble finding work in the down economy. "I think I got the best of both worlds. I got local people who came in for 10% more (than Indians). And I found really good ones," Carson says in the article.
Click Here to read the full BW article titled "U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries" and dated DECEMBER 2, 2003.