I have a different experience.
Hired one for a job for $xxx
I liked the work and paid him 2* $xxx
First thing you shoud understand is English is not the primary language there and lot of them who are considered Excellent programmers/Designers are not good with English.
If you don't have time to work with them, it is good you hire some one locally who is better at English.
I know a lot of peope who take work and sub-contract back to India.
One of my friend who is an Excellent Oracle DBA could not get a job for few months.
He used to get a lot of phone calls and any one that spoke to him on the phone backed out.
He got selected in the very first face to face interview he got.
He is the Lead DBA working for the same company for more than 10 years, his Engish is sitll bad.
They know that they can depend on him for the work and they don't care for his Engish skills.
Unix Severs and Oracle Database are fine with this Engish.
Was not planning to complain about this but siince you raised the issue I can say is I had these experiences with the past 5 believed to be Indian programmers I hired via the forums or Scriptlance:
1. WordPress Programmer at this forum. Hired to do 2 WP Blogs. First one he did well and fairly good speed but with a 2nd one I hired him to do a little later I made the mistake of prepaying as he requested but after 4 mos of time it was obvious he was not delivering the job with slow or no communications. Then my emails bounced and he disappeared from the forum and kept my money which was lost. That was over one year ago with no trace of him or my money.
2. Content writing. Poor job, mosty due to not being familiar with the US based subjects and poor English skills. Later had to rewrite a lot of it myself. Paid anyay.
3. Content writing, a different writer. Fair job, mosty due to not being familiar with the US based subjects and only fair English skills. Later had to rewrite some of it myself. Paid anyway.
4. HTML/Script programming, did overall job OK, but not according to my actual specifications and never followed directions as far as important functionality goes. Paid anyway.
5. HTML/Script programming, after a long delay still has not started the job, apparently because they do not fully understand the job even though my job description was concise and in good detail. They always want to chat about the job even though there is really little to chat about since the job description is detailed and good. Anyway, talking is an issue due to the 12 hr time difference and their office open day hrs there but nights here. Not paid yet, job still open.
