Submission + - Silicon Valley cheaper than India?
uniquebydegrees writes: "InfoWorld is reporting today (link here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/29/riya-wag e-inflation-sinks_1.html) about the effects of the tech boom on wages in India, with a profile of Riya.com, a visual search startup with headquarters in Bangalore, India and Silicon Valley. With high demand for qualified programmers pushing wages in India up from 30% to 75% of their U.S. counterparts in recent years, Riya was forced to pull up stakes in Bangalore and consolidate in the U.S.
Turns out, that 75 cents on the dollar is a lot, when you figure in the unreliable infrastructure in India (rolling blackouts) and the tendency for Indian IT workers to value salary over options.
Figure those in, and Silicon Valley looks like a good deal — or at least it did to Riya. As the article points out, startups are particularly vulnerable to the effects of wage inflation in emerging markets like India, because they can't afford to take on, then train inexperienced workers, as IBM, HP and Oracle can.
"Startups aren't places where you train people from the ground up," said Riya CEO Munjal Shah. "They're places where either you know what you're doing or you don't. We paid to hire the best.""
