When I was in IIT in the late 80's, the hot topic was brain drain out of India. So it is interesting we are talking about returnees now. As the Indian economy liberalizes, talent naturally stays home to pursue opportunity. In any case, India could export a lot of talent, and still not run out (!) - so I never worry about the "drain" part.
On returnees, it is harder the longer someone has been out of India. Two of my brothers returned and they are doing really well (both start-ups http://vembu.com and http://gofrugaltech.com ), but they didn't stay in the US much at all.
My advice: if you are returning, assume that you never left. Lower your expectations (in every way), you will find it easy to exceed them. Traffic is chaotic, civic administration sucks, water problems and so on. But there is something else to India ... the interesting part for me has been that in such poor surroundings, I have always enjoyed a very intellectually stimulating atmosphere. I still can't explain that part.
I'm not Indian myself. I work a lot with Indian suppliers though. Lately there seem to be more returnees in that pool running little outsourcing companies.
My own experience is often frustration. The best jobs (quality & time sensitive with higher pay) tend to go to more expensive American suppliers. We end up paying 2-3 as much when we need (what I guess is about) 20% more time spent on QA. I tell them so.
The difference with these returnees seems to be that they share some of my frustrations. I'm not sure that will go anywhere, but this is very early days.
Re: lack of quality, it is a classic "early days" problem. 1950s Japan had a reputation much like made-in-China has today. It is amazing Japan is synonymous with quality today.
It is easy to explain: in a mature economy, any new company would have a mix of experience and new talent. In an emerging economy, practically everyone is a rookie, regardless of age. There are entire million-plus population cities in India where no one, literally not one person, would have any experience in how to manage a 10 person technology project.
The only way to figure stuff out is to make mistakes. Quality is an emergent property coming out of experience. And that is the reason societies don't go from $300 GDP to $30K GDP in 1 year, though it would be possible to carefully mix an immigrant group coming out of a $300 GDP area into a $30K GDP area, and as long as the mixing is at a controlled rate, it is possible to boost the per-capita GDP of the immigrant group very high in a very short time (Indians in the US offer a good example). That is the extra value added by experience of having done stuff.
This brings me back to the returnees/emigrant issues.
The catch 22 seems to be that individuals, once they have that experience, had a high likelihood of leaving. The potential resource is that due to returning the pool of people which such experience is getting an boost above the organic trend.
Obviously it's not all managers coming back but at least there are people that have seen it done. In the case that I mentioned, these are people that previously (I assume) worked on the type of projects that they now miss out on. They saw their previous employers not bothering to target the type of work they are getting. They know that the gap between these two is relatively small and that crossing it is both worthwhile and possible.
> Re: lack of quality, it is a classic "early days" problem. 1950s Japan had a reputation much like made-in-China has today. It is amazing Japan is synonymous with quality today.
On returnees, it is harder the longer someone has been out of India. Two of my brothers returned and they are doing really well (both start-ups http://vembu.com and http://gofrugaltech.com ), but they didn't stay in the US much at all.
My advice: if you are returning, assume that you never left. Lower your expectations (in every way), you will find it easy to exceed them. Traffic is chaotic, civic administration sucks, water problems and so on. But there is something else to India ... the interesting part for me has been that in such poor surroundings, I have always enjoyed a very intellectually stimulating atmosphere. I still can't explain that part.