Because the masses of underpaid Infosys developers are really bad. I used to work at a name-brand, large corporation known for hiring top-end talent, and did a lot of interviewing while there.

Inevitably the people who are looking to jump ship from Infosys or other low-end consultancy are woefully underqualified for even entry-level positions. I've actually interviewed people from these shops who cannot write Hello World in a language of their own choosing, I've also had people who didn't know what a tree data structure was. I'm unsure how Infosys et al can farm these guys out for such high hourly rates, it's surely criminal.

Sniping from Infosys and Wipro isn't worth it for top companies because there's hardly anyone there worth sniping. They do try sometimes though, since inevitably there is a diamond in there just waiting to get the hell out of dodge. There is effectively zero intersection between the types of developers Google wants, and the types of developers Infosys wants.

As for who Google/Microsoft/etc are trying to hire... I wouldn't call it "top talent" exactly. The H-1B pool in these companies isn't a parade of who's whos of the software industry, though some of them are certainly top-1% coders. It's more like "very good coders" - people who know the tech, learn fast, have solid fundamentals, and get shit done - which is more than can be said for the majority of the talent pool. Simply eyeballing it, I'd say that Facebook/Google/etc are targeting the top 5-10 percentile of coders.

Back in days when I was looking for a job, Infosys was the dream company to work for in India for a lot of top talent. They would hire only the toppers from top 10 colleges in India and that too with a proper puzzles test like all top US companies. So they hire people based only on academic credentials and then train them for 6 months in a "Infosys University".

I think the perception in US about the unqualified Indian engineers is because you might have seen engineers mostly in their budding years(1-3 years). As with everything else, those people do learn a thing or two as they gain more experience.

I came from India(never worked in Big Bodyshop like Infosys) and have been in US for 5 years now. I have seen really a lot of really dumb people and some really good people on both countries.

Check out the puzzles book that Infosys uses to hire people in India. http://books.google.com/books?id=F-idu9oxkdgC&printsec=f...

It's also interesting that everyone agrees that the only thing in short supply is the highest quality programmers, but immigration policy is focused on increasing the total number of immigrants and not just the highest quality ones. Under our current strategy, we'll get a similarly small proportion of top quality programmers along with 97% who are basically there to keep down operating costs for MSFT (or Infosys, Wipro etc - arguably "bad actors" from the perspective of how Silicon Valley likes to do business).

If we were serious about alleviating the shortage of top quality hires, we'd have a way to increase the quota of "the best" technical talent and not the current blanket approach, which really favors major employers trying to save costs. Maybe we let google design a technical test for anyone who wants to work here in a technical role. :)

I think Facebook is sincere in their desire for quality talent, but since their CEO happens to be one of the youngest billionaires in the world, who has only worked at one company which he founded as a pup, he is equally inexperienced in "the real world" (eg, how many other companies operate and what they use H1B for) and probably a very poor choice for a leader on immigration reform.

Yes, they're trying to hire top talent through the H-1B program. Immigration status is orthogonal to talent.

That's the reason they're generally not trying to recruit from the masses of underpaid infosys developers.

I don't know about Infosys, but we have a TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) branch here in Uruguay, and it is very common for junior developers to do a few years there, and then quickly realize they've "outgrown" the company and get recruited somewhere else or start their own company - and those "child" companies recruit the cream of the remaining crop, leaving the worse/less motivated employees at the mother company.

TCS does try to keep some of the better ones around, but from the outside I cannot know how succesful they are.

And that is the reason why there is a mass of underpaid talents.

It's definitely possible that the blue-chip companies are missing an opportunity to develop talent out of that ecosystem, but it's also not their responsibility to do so. Most of us who are senior engineers at whichever high-flying company were, at one point, just working on some boring-ass webapp.