I've worked as a contractor since 1997. I started as an employee of a contracting house. Then, in 1999, I became an independent contractor.
I'm not talking about differences that can be explained away by the benefits packages. I'm talking about the differences between billable rates that H1B Visa contracting houses can pay their employees vs. what local companies must pay their employees (benefits not withstanding) vs. what local contracting companies pay their employees. There is a huge disparity.
On top of this is the new trend: Companies are setting up their own departments in the foreign countries they used to bring people in from. The front-line costs savings are enormous, and everybody claps each other on the back. The second-line costs are not as apparent, though, and will (eventually) begin to bite the companies in the bottom line: most of the work that they're farming out to the foreign departments is having to be redone by their local talent here.
That is what is happening here too. In fact even as I am posting right now I am fixing stuff we got from India. They are also NOT being forth coming about various files that I need to complete my debug. I have a netlist that has the main clock disconnected. India says that their tool can see the connection ... I have been crawling thru the netlist they sent and I can see that the main signal has no source. Also the netlist they sent me had a syntax error in the oscillator model ... it was misnamed and the netlist would have NEVER run without an edit. So if their netlist works ... they did NOT send me the up-to-date version ... why am I NOT surprised