"but in fact I have found the quality of our Indian colleagues is actually very high, with all of the PMs and technical people coming with a huge amount of technical training and experience" --- CDD
That suggests to me that either your assessment of them is faulty or the roles you find for them are very limited in scope, like project management by box-ticking.
Most of the offshore resource I have encountered is extremely poor. The few that are brilliant do not stay your offshore resource for very long. It is a simple fact that India, with what, 20% of the world's population, has exactly ZERO universities in the world top 200.
I would never claim to be a programmer. But after a week of looking at the output of some of our offshore programmers I just want to pull what's left of my hair out. Its absolutely hideous, total rubbish. Conference calls with people whose English is extremely poor are extremely frustrating, and any complaints are brushed off by our PHBs with "well, I bet it's better than your Tamil/Bengali/Vietnamese" Of course it is. But it's worse than my French, German and Portuguese, and I would never dream of putting those on my CV.
However, the people whose work is really, really overrated are not the offshore resource but the PHBs who encourage, adopt and "oversee" it before declaring it, as CDD does above, a great success in the absence of any meaningful metrics. Their corporate loyalty is also piss poor --- they don't give a shit that their company is going to go down the pan long term as long as they get their little short term bonus and fuck off to the next victim.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
