Hmm .. Well of you were in Techlogix I guess ! That's a good company, one of the best, they say its Google in Pakistan. But then one cant generalize with one such company. I agree that in the past few years we have taken a totally different direction as an industry. Lot of investment, Lot of MIT, Stanford techie stuff coming to Pakistan as start ups, but how many companies are there and what masses do they employ ? After Techlogix we Have Netsol(350 - 400 Developer), NCR(300 - 400 developers), Systems(300 - 400 avg), Trg(not sure), Innovative (100 - 120). Except NCR and TRG all of them are typical 3rd world philosophy employers. So a Techlogix like company is hard to find or doesn't exist.
I have a theory to back my argument which is, Pakistan is a 3rd world Country or an Emerging/developing Country. For the rest world we are a very cost effective place (cheap labor, low running expense which is going up day by day) to offshore work from US and European market. out of that 90% work is the usual Database eccentric development with a difference of tools and technologies. This causes us (in general not w.r.t to a few companies) to still be a labor class Tech industry, Hence all the design and architectural phase of the project is done on site and rest of the typical use case programming is done offshore.
Consider India, it has a pretty huge market as compared to Pakistan, and people and i personally would agree that Indians are good mathematicians but not good Software Engineers (guess that's what someone from google said). BUT Yet what they have is that, they have specialized in almost any tech domain that you can think of (almost). They have crossed the threshold (as i call it) for not being a 3rd world labor tech industry. that doesn't mean they dont have a labor class, for that they have a very different and interesting strategy. What they do is they train non degree holders to tools for rapid development. People in techlogix might know about our (techlogix mostly) and their BPM industry. We have software engineers working for our BPMs where as in India Big companies employ non degree holders possibly high school qualified people and they train them on the tools, and that's there donkey team.
Summary to my point is if a country doesn't have some specialized domain to offer (it can be database eccentric applications but with the most complex enterprise); with time that country would become just become a "coder class" solution providers, and as with the time, more competition, you would have to do more in less money which means a Graphic Designer would be fulfilling the responsibility of a Web Developer, and a Web Developer doing an architects job to cut costs. Hence you would see big companies doing not so good work as i mentioned earlier, as its hard to progress with a philosophy like techlogix if you don't have good enough people to carry it on.
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