It's not a cost thing, it's not solved by salary.

It's a culture mismatch, I am certain that Indian SWE's think that American SWE's are difficult to work with.

In India "work is god" (as a report of mine has once said), and perception is reality. You do as good as you can and hide your mistakes.

America is aggressively: Pro-failure. In which I mean American SWE's will fail and move on with the idea that they've learned and grown.

It's just a different mindset, and while you probably agree with the American mindset, they'll be similar to each other in reality.

The reason that people dislike working with Indians is:

A) A communication issue, which is exacerbated by not writing specifications properly.

and

B) Indians wanting to go slower and with proper specifications and strictly adhering to those specifications.

Germans are also somewhat like this, so Indians and Germans tend to work significantly better together than Americans and Indians.

Once you get into a mindset of quality not mattering and only pushing down the costs there’s no coming back. Look a large retail brands and how disposable we treat things. They went from northeast to southern US to Mexico to China. The creation of the product will happen in the US for cultural reasons (you cannot outsource marketing generally), but it all hits a wall.

Look at Boeing.

Europeans are paid way way less and aren’t hard to work with. Same with Australia.

See: Amazon