"And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications...."

I suspect that's due to the rapid growth of the software development industry there. Allegedly similar things happened during the dot boom here in the 90s, when there was so much demand for software that many unqualified and under-qualified people were hired.

On the other hand, there was a Wall Street Journal article recently (much discussed here, I think) about how the best developers in India can command salaries closer to their Silicon Valley counterparts than the typical Indian IT salary.

Perhaps "you get what you pay for" applies?

"someone who apparently has a Masters in IT yet doesn't understand that "var1 = textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something I want to see in proper VB.Net code?"

I suspect you can find similar code from American developers. The only difference is that over here a lot of the less dedicated programmers have left the field and so now we have their Indian counterparts doing the same low quality work for less money.

"Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter "wow, that's genius" when I cobbled together a session-based auth script.... ugh."

If the article's portrayal of "Honey" is indicative, he may have been just trying to stroke your ego. :)

"Real-world experience is more important than qualifications."

No argument there.