That 5 usd metric is just random and I just can't agree with you. Everybody has to start somewhere and considering the cost of living in South Asia, $5 per hour isn't all that bad. $5 an hour may be some kind of janitorial level income in the US, but it's not so in India, because of the foreign exchange rate difference. Of course a talented and ambitious programmer can earn much more than that amount if they seek out the opportunities. And you need more than just cs talent to discover and exploit said opportunities.

The point I was making was that companies like HCL don't care about cs talent for most of their hires anyway. They are competing for contracts which require them to show bench strength. Since it's literally impossible show 1000s of top notch engineers just sitting on their rolls jobless, they just hire whoever comes along and after a few months of "training" say shit like, "We have a million engineers just waiting hand in hand to personally work on your project". Of course they also hire some who know what they are doing, but most hires are only for appearance sake. Since if they manage to win a big contract that will easily cover for all the hires and more.

As for the workers themselves, most won't show any interest because they have no idea what impact their work is having. For example they rarely interact with clients. Their metrics for success has nothing to do with quality of work. I can't imagine workers from any culture, including Americans and Europeans, evolving into expert professionals under these conditions.