Where can I hire lower cost software developers in the US?
You can hire cheaper headcount in smaller cities, but you will not be able to decrease your total cost. Because the US has an open labor market, you should expect that a “low cost” developer will be, at best, proportionally less productive than a market-rate developer. (The same does not hold for India because of the limits the US places on immigration.) The fact that nearly all US software companies have development centers in places with high developer salaries (the Bay Area, Boston, etc.) strongly suggests that, for a fixed staffing budget, a few highly paid developers will outproduce a much larger group of “low cost” developers. As a consultant who has worked on projects throughout North America, this jibes with my own experience. One NYC trading-systems developer I know is manifestly more productive than a small-city bank’s entire twenty-person programming staff. So what if he makes 10x what the small-city folks make? (To those talking about low cost of living: a place with a low
