When asked if he was concerned about the way the study pits American software developers against Indian software developers, Desai says fanning the flames of competition and animosity was never Gild's intention.

"This is not a way to justify or not justify offshoring," he says. "Our motivation was to collect a remarkable amount of data that we don't think anyone else has and see what we find. This [data] by no means says that any individual programmer in the U.S. is better than any individual programmer in India, and vice versa. These are trends. If I'm a CIO looking to hire programmers in India who are going to be working on mainstream programming languages, I'll find good people there. If I'm looking for Web programmers, I'm better off looking for those people in the U.S."

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in CIO's Careers Drilldown.