Middle of the road technical and design talent in the USA needs to be afraid

Here's a really good article by Jason Freedman re: finding a technical co-founder. An interesting side nugget from this piece is that low level to middle of the road engineers and designers (specifically web developers/designers) need to very very afraid. Towards the end, Jason talks about getting a prototype built using off-shore engineers and design services from companies like 99designs.com and PSD2HTML.com. I myself have been using oDesk talent to build not only prototypes but actual live products for a while now. The more and more I use these services, the more and more I see the blurring of the lines between US based engineers and off shore ones. Initially, you could only expect to have low level work done off shore and almost never any design work. However, the world is catching up. It was the case that you could never find a good Python or RoR developer via oDesk. Today, there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of them there. As for design, I've found designers in Pakistan and Eastern Europe who actually do better work than 75% of the designers I've used stateside. The kicker is that they're also about 60%-80% cheaper. In the face of this level of competition, it's just economically irresponsible to spend $5K-$6K a month on an average web designer when I can spend a third of that for the same level of work overseas.

I still believe that we lead the world in the high-end strata of talent. If you're looking for that rockstar developer or designer, there's no better place to find one than the good ole USA. But everyone else below better prepare themselves for a very harsh reality. Talent around the world is getting better and they don't have to pay $2K a month in rent.