Well if you think that all it takes is six months to learn anything then you've never worked in any technology area.
No US workers are not at a disadvantage compared to Indian ones, because they are better and accomplish more.
I honestly don't know how to make it clear to you except to repeat it over and over again. It...doesn't...matter. I've been involved in several outsourcing efforts and the only thing that the companies look at is the bottom line. IBM came in and said "We can run your IT shop for X billion dollars." Management looks at the reduced headcount and what that does to the bottom line and says, "Go ahead." So IBM comes in. One third of the existing workforce becomes IBM employees, one third remain with the company, and one third get to go work at Home Depot. And IBM replaces that missing third with IBM India or IBM Brazil or IBM Poland. And that's where IBM adds to THEIR bottom line. Believe me, there is nothing quite like arranging an international conference call on three continents where a good percentage of the people participating are less than fluent in English.
If the Indian can do as much his wage will soon show it or he won't stay in India.
Why won't he?
And "replacements" from overseas may be cheap if the job is checkout at Home Depot, but if it is programming a computer to do automated translation through sophisticate models of human grammars combined with reinforcement learning, no they aren't cheap.
In the long run, no. But companies don't look past the current quarter's figures. The look at the promise and what those savings will do to their bonus and stock price and keep jumping off the outsourcing cliff. Like I said I've participated in several outsourcings and I've yet to see a single one achieve the success and cost savings that were promised. But that will not stop companies from continuing down that road because the outsourcing companies will continue to offer results that those companies will find hard to resist.
Opposing geniuses moving to Silicon Valley from Bangalore is mindless ideological stupidity run amok.
And why is that an incentive for a U.S. student to want to compete to see how small a salary he can work for?
You are either arguing with a brick wall or an outsourcer.
Smart people learn what they have to and can do so on very short time scales, when they are allowed to. That is what makes the real world so much more efficient than academia, as a matter of fact.
As for the IBM story, who is the director of corporate strategy at IBM who maps such things out? Might he know anything about it?
The Indian genius will move to London and make 100,000 pounds a year and have a much better life.
And companies not only look past the current quarter, they look past the current generation. In mine we look for talent still in college and occasionally while still in high school. Anywhere in the world. Grok, already.