Originally Posted by
SysDude
The Yahoo article, your thread title, and your post above falsely assert that Boeing outsourced software development to employees that were paid $9 per hour.
The reference to that wage was made by a consultant who has no idea how much Boeing's subcontract employees are paid. Your careless and inaccurate pronouncement illustrates how such inflammatory claims are spread.
“Engineering started becoming a commodity,”,” said Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began losing work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s.
U.S.-based avionics companies in particular moved aggressively, shifting more than 30% of their software engineering offshore versus 10% for European-based firms in recent years, said Hilderman, an avionics safety consultant with three decades of experience whose recent clients include most of the major Boeing suppliers.
With a strong dollar, a big part of the attraction was price. Engineers in India made around $5 an hour; it’s now $9 or $10, compared with $35 to $40 for those in the U.S. on an H1B visa, he said. But he’d tell clients the cheaper hourly wage equated to more like $80 because of the need for supervision, and he said his firm won back some business to fix mistakes.