I'm from India and 5 of <insert your country here> devs can not replace me. Just kidding, I hope you understand that India is a huge country and you can find the entire spectrum of talent here.

Don't expect smart folks from India to work for $20 or even $50 an hour. You will get what you pay for.

My experience is that if you can pay 0.5 x <your salary> to an Indian developer I am sure you can find someone who can totally replace you.

Most of the times companies who want to "offshore to India" want to pay no more than 0.1 x <their local developer salary> and then cry when they can't deliver.

Indian tech companies are offering really competitive salaries nowadays. I have even started to see some Indian companies hire/outsource to Europe because it's cheaper.

This is exactly the case.

In my experience of looking for remote engineers, top talent costs the same pretty much everywhere and the great engineers in India (Russia, Poland,..) demand a pretty similar salary in USD when asked to perform the same tasks.

I think parent is under the impression that run of the mill engineers offshore SWEs can perform the same as a Googler.

I agree, but even great Indian software programmers are happy with much less. Getting half of what a similar American would get should make any talented dev extremely happy here.

I get around 1/3rd of what I would receive in the US, work with a globally distributed team, and I'm quite satisfied with my salary and the company quite satisfied with me.

Probably you they cannot replace (taking your word for it). But that does not mean they cannot replace no one else from your company.

Also most of the big companies have their largest R&D centers in India (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Adobe,..., Uber, etc.). It is ridiculous to say that those offices are doing any less work than their USA offices.

My main point was that salaries are based on the employee market that a company can utilize. So 'cost of living adjustments' are going to become a norm in a remote-first world.

Regarding the competencies of developers in India, I don't doubt your experience but I know that there are plenty of skilled developers working at Google, Linkedin, Amazon, Microsoft and countless budding startups in India.

A developer earning 1/5 of an American silicon valley salary in India is really good, they could easily replace you. The problem isn't them, the problem are the developers earning 1/20 of your salary in India, they are as crap as the bad developers in USA, and they are what most companies trying to get cheap headcount in India go for when they outsource to there.

Edit: The above numbers were 5 years ago, might be closer today, but still.

I know someone who made this exact decision. They looked at the cost of software engineers in the Bay Area, then hired a team of 5 for $20 an hour each ex-us.

How did that go for them?

Great, they developed a functional product and were able to get the MVP to market. Because they went ex-us, they were able to self fund.

You get what you pay for even in LCOL places.

However the main difficulty with outsourcing is probably that the company want so save the hassle of recruiting and having employees and procures crappy programming sweatshops rather then having proper employer-employee relations.

If the goal was not to save "hassle" and cheaping out on already cheaper programmers hireing in LCOL countries would probably be a much different experience.