> Similar experiences working with teams in Vietnam and
    > India

A very small dataset, but I've found the mindset of Eastern European teams I've worked with and Indian teams I've worked with to be massively different. The EE teams were very culturally similar to the more Western teams, but with funny accents.

The Indian outsourcing I've worked with has - with no exceptions to date - been an absolute clusterfuck. Incompetence compounded by arrogance, byzantine technical architecture, inflexibility, obsession with rank, authority, and certification, and a tendency to lie out of bad situations. It felt like identical experiences across three different projects with three different large IT services firms that were India based. I began to seriously worry I was going to start to have a subconscious racist reaction to Indian accents over the phone.

I'm sure there are dreadful Eastern European outfits, and exceptional Indian ones, but my gut reaction will be to reach for the Eastern Europeans first next time I need to outsource development.

Well, Romania as well as Hungary and Bulgaria are fully European cultures. Sure, there are historical influences and economic contexts that made them different than mainstream Western Europe, and one can quote "Balkans" as a different attitude, but in terms of mindsets and value systems EE and WE are in the same category, different than India, China and other geographical regions. Not passing a judgement value here, just pointing out the similarities and the reason why US/WE people can work easier with EE people than with, say, Chinese - just as those Chinese would work better with Vietnamese or Indonesians, etc.

As a particular element to note: say what you want about it, but behind the Iron Curtain education was taken very seriously in sciences and engineering (maybe less so in the so-called humanistic areas because those would risk to come in conflict with the official communist doctrine). The technology and labs in the universities were sometimes lacking, but they surely made up in terms of solid theoretical education. So the foundations were there for competency when the computer age dawned - what generally lacked was (still is) the capital.

I think in general working with large IT firms is always going to be a CF regardless of where they are from. This is especially true if you are a product dev shop as against enterprise IT. I think a better comparison would be small sized companies in India with the ones in Romania. I am not defending Indian outfits. I tend to agree that it is hard to find great tech companies to work with in India. But I suspect some of that has to do with just the sheer volume of tech outfits in India. As with anything its hard to keep average quality high with scale. Infosys used to be a top company on top tech campuses like IITs in mid 90s. I can tell you some of the guys who joined where absolute top notch tech guys back then. Those days are long gone. The issues that you point often are an outcome of working with incompetent or unmotivated folks. The best talent in India now works for companies that are catering to the local market (Snapdeal, Flipkart, Ola Cabs). So you may be better off looking at countries where top talent still is in the outsourcing business because local market doesn't offer enough returns for their talent.