[UPDATE: To all those who got here by clicking a link entitled "Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India", that title has been retired as an unfortunate misfire on my part: much of the conversation was lead astray as though I meant to single out India in particular, and it landed for some as having racist connotations.
It is now titled "Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Cheap Overseas Programming", which much more aptly captures the meat and message of this essay.  And now without further ado...]
I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget.
Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.
Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but I think the Indian firm is, as the saying goes, making up for it in volume.  And that’s to say nothing of the time our heroes have spent proctoring the whole process: in his words, they’ve got to be constantly super explicit in their instructions, or it comes back wrong–then then have to spend more hours getting it fixed (this is but one instance of why I am suspect of the hourly model in my industry).
“I’m wondering if you’re available–my partner says we just need an American programmer to get in their and clean up a few things to get us out the door, we figure it would take the right person...