The comments on Munjal's post are far more insightful and revealing than the post itself - this is not uncommon with blog posts. Please read those as well.

Here's the one left by Srini Ramakrishnan "Companies looking for top talent can't also afford to enjoy the advantages of cost arbitrage. If you are truly looking for top talent, you hire the best you can find, where ever they are. They will always have the option to relocate to the US or similar wage band country, and hence they aren't going to come cheap.

What works for code factories doesn't necessarily apply for boutique product companies."

I think that sums it up pretty well

bogus story.

In Bangalore, IT salaries range from $200 per month to $2K per month. So how can they be 75% of Valley salaries?

The real truth is - the good engineers prefer to work for the branded companies. InfoSys, Wipro, Google, Microsoft.

Everyone else may join a startup for a short while, with the hope of leveraging a good job at the branded companies.

200 $? wtf? I live in Bangalore. The starting slary for someone just out of school is about 1200 $ as of today.

But yes, this is about 15-20 % of a valley salary, not 75 % so you do have a point.

I know a technical writer (software) in Bangalore who earns Rs 10K per month (about $200?). If you know of a better opportunity, do email me and I can pass it along.

heh , yeah technical writers are literature graduates who are basically unemployable. If you know any good programmers in Banaglore making less than1500 $ a month, let me know :-). I know many MANY companies who are finding it impossible to hire even at those rates.

You might want to check Manjuls blog about this story. http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2007/04/episode_26_indi.html

He is not making it up. He is talking about the best engineers that he could recruit for his startup in India.

Probably he is looking for cheap labour. IIT/REC people always prefer startup so i cannot believe his statement about them. In fact he is not able to sell his dreams to them.

Simply not true. Read the insightful comments that disagree, on the main post.

I too, am tempted to blame my failures on someone or something else.

It might be getting expensive, but they have a lot of really talented programmers there - and we don't have enough here and the government won't let more of them come here.

So basically, their salaries will continue to rise until they are in parity with similarly skilled Americans.