Responding to you in this thread, because this is the way: the only success I've seen to offshoing to india, is to actually run the office yourself, have an exec over there, manage and control hiring, pay above market rates, etc...

I've been with two companies that have been aquired, and the first thing the PE/New Companies do is aggressive offshoring for cutting costs.

1) worked, because the aquiring company had an established office in Hyderabad, and we flew the tech leads over to the US to spend six weeks embeddeed with the team, etc.

2) the second one failed miserably becasue we had an Exec VP who told our engineers that he was replacing them in India for half the price, and his strategy was to hire a contracting company.... after several months of "contractors" coming and going, someone else in the company realized what needed to happen....

> The good engineers in india know their value and get it.

The job market is not that efficient anywhere, especially India. Lots of people work their way up from crappy jobs to good ones, just like in the US.

>My company has offices in india because you have to manage them yourself not use middlemen. You can train the locals to be great managers (at least some).

"some members of this primitive tribe can be taught our sophisticated ways"

The issue with middlemen is they are basically labor arbitrageurs and have an incentive to hire the cheapest people possible and inflate their credentials/abilities. Same thing happens with onshore consulting firms.

>wages for good people in india are worse similar people in the us, but often high than in europe.

"Often higher than Europe" is a stretch. Typical big co with an India office pays maybe 20-30k USD per year for an engineer. And that is a good job relatively speaking. Top tech companies pay more but they also pay more in Europe

Could you expand on the other problems with Europe other than hiring and firing laws?