I am sorry but your token Indian is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. First of all regarding your broad hypothesis,(which comes with a good dose of judgment on the side), "why do a good portion of Indian Developers suck". To quote a similar question, I would ask you "Why are great portion (50%) of Americans turned racist in 2017?". But I won't ask that question because as I know, things in life for which you have a high confidence in having a fantastic one line explanation usually turns out that those are crappy theories. Hence I don't believe in one line explanations to complicated questions.

Putting that aside, there is a Fundamental Law of Incompetence which says, "In any random sample of a group of people in any country, the amount of incompetents is a constant". We have a lot of so called incompetent people because A) you may probably outsource to the cheapest bidder/contractor B) We have 1.3 billion people, of course a large number are incompetent. I have worked with outsourcing teams in Romania, and the law still holds, I have worked in Germany and the US, and the law still holds. It has yet to happen that I have walked into a country and observed, "Holy shit, so many geniuses are around here, what kind of Cola do you guys drink?". Now you may know that there are other "legit" multinationals who have captive R&D Centers in India which are awesomely working cause hey each country has a thick creamy layer of talent and those companies employ them. Case in point, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Google, Adobe's big campus near Delhi, Amazon etc etc. Plus a whole slew of startups popping up in India. So your token Indian thinks that all of those people are retarded?

What irks me about your guy is not that he is spouting what is the common understanding of the lot. But you are possibly talking to a regular uninformed guy with pet peeves about family and caste system. I know quite a few of those. What those kids need is a spinal surgery.

Did he mention how crap the infrastructure is in most of the Universities in India? How shoddy the teaching is? Oh it all starts with the School system, which is the base factory of parent/caste/society oppressed individuals who just blame everything else than their own free will to progress and learn in life. That's the reason why so many smart people tend to migrate in order to do a Masters or a Phd program because University Research does not exist in India (even in the top 10 universities).

The boom in IT sector in India circa 1995 was a god send for so many impoverished but educated Indians who could now afford to literally have a decent work environment and pay and that brought so many of us out of poverty. The much derided call centers brought employment to a range of blue collared workers who put their balls to the walls and attempted and mastered not only fluent English to some extent but to copy the American Accent. Now all these whiny newly born Indians with their trust funds piss all over that fact. I know you may think outsourcing is bad and call centers sucked, but hey market forces will decide that. No one asked any US multinationals to make your underwear in China, they all did by their own free will. The world economy will shift focus to something else.

I by no means want to engage with you harshly, you have a genuine curiosity about the subject but I would implore people on hacker news at least to think about the World in a more refined way.