Response to 30 pounds in 30 days.

I am an economist by training, and also an investor in cross-border startup teams. On both fronts, the original article strikes me as unfair and inaccurate.<p>The fact is that there are scores of successful valley start-ups and product tech companies, with successful teams of product engineers in good ol' India writing their core production ready code - (not low cost "back-end", whatever that means) - I could name dozens of such companies.<p>Equally, there are new several start-ups founded in India going after global internet product markets (see freshdesk.com, recently funded by Accel Partners).<p>Like in the Valley, some of them hire great programmers, some average, and some awful. This reflects the labor pool of a deep market of available talent.<p>The "original" OP is clearly being unfair to hard working entrepreneurs and hackers in low-cost economies. As well as disregarding, basic economic theory of a connected global labor market. (Sorry Paul Krugman!).<p>Disclosure: I am investor in the OP who wrote the response. p.s: Replace "India" with low cost country of choice.

The OP is clearly guilty of over generalizations. Some of the most effective startups I know are successful because of the cost/speed advantages they have been able to realize by utilizing developers in India, E. Europe, Phillippines, etc.

<i>he comes off sounding like a redneck</i><p>Isn't that insulting and racist as well?

&#62;<i>Some of these programmers are terrible. Some are awesome. I dare say, just like in NYC? :)</i><p>Only with a different percentage of terrible and awesome.<p>&#62;<i>Do all Indian/Pakistani/Egyptian/etc. hackers deserve to be painted with the same brush?</i><p>No, of course there are great Indian/Pakistani/etc programmers.<p>But generalising is not about being fair or accurate.<p>Generalisation is a compromise between being accurate and making a decision in time.<p>It's about being accurate _enough_ to make decisions as correct as possible without getting lost in the minutiae.<p>And the reason people generalise about Indian/etc programmers is because they have been burned a lot of times by them (and not as many times by NYC programmers).<p>If I had a nickel for every "please sir, solve my programming problem from me" type by an Indian programmer in an internet forum I would be rich. And a lot of those posters are not kids in school. They openly admit they work for a company, programming.