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No, environmental law, labor law, product liability law, and other regulations did that. Free trade just saved us from some of the consequences of all that. With consequences which mainly fell on the "beneficiaries" of some of that law.
Software engineers are still paid an enormous amount of money, probably the best you can do without being a politician, an MBA, or having an advanced professional degree. It's true Indian labor has knocked the lower end out of the market for Americans, though that's mostly H-1bs rather than offshoring (offshore Indian programmers are so terrible even compared to bottom-tier H-1Bs I wouldn't be surprised if they're worse than useless), but the software market has expanded so much it's really hard to call this a net negative.
Fair points I do agree that over regulation was another part of the death knell of local manufacturing. Offshoring was part of it as well though.
Indian programmers are really not that terrible. I work at a bigcorp and our whole team is Indian. The bad ones get fired and over time the remaining team is decent.
Helps that our manager over here is Indian too though, I suppose.
Indian programmers (or other tech employees) aren't necessarily worse than their counterparts here. It's just that they, like skilled workers anywhere else, cost more money than their peers. And since most companies outsourcing to India are cheap bastards, they pay peanuts and so they get bottom of the barrel employees.
In addition to the normal race-to-the-bottom and lemon problems, there's also uniquely severe incentives toward fraud. Once you tell a lie, the truth will forever be your enemy, and there's a lot of reasons for low-tier immigrant-focused employers to have to lie. And since a few particularly scammy businesses make up the majority of H1-B applications in a few fields, there's a lot of potential to run into hilariously-incompetent people even where the median option would have been meh or even good.
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Most people are familiar with body-shop Indian programmers. All body shops use the same tricks: staff the teams with people that are tolerably underqualified and rotate them out as soon as they show promise. Indian body shops are simply big enough, cheap enough and remote enough that they can do this brazenly.
If a local body shop tried to rotate one of the devs that I actually liked, I would just have a coffee with the guy to confirm it wasn't a personal reason and bully the account manager into keeping him on my team. Worst case scenario, he tries to fire the dev for cooperating with me and I get to poach him with clear conscience.
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