> largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving.
agree on most part including that onshore billing is obvious more than offshore but still for client it's saving as oppose to hiring FTE. Often client also want good resource to stick so they allow them to move to onsite. In my case, we informed client after my H1B was stamped, that I have to move to States either in this project or other project, client approved in 2-3 hours. For the another resource, client took 4-5 months to decide and then replied that we don't have budget for onshore billing.
So in case of good resource, it's often win-win for everyone involved.
Oh this brings back memories. A few years ago I worked for a company which offloaded functional testing to a team in Chennai, including pre-release shakedown tests. We did that until there was a release which started to blow up in a critical point that was very hard to recover from, right after being deployed to all customers. We were baffled because we had test sets covering precisely this scenario, and the tests all passed. To cut to the chase, we soon discovered that our trusty Chennai team was not to be trusted and in reality was signing off releases without performing a single test. Everyone in that team was fired and replaced by other replacement testers also based from Chennai, and once the new testers started running the exact same test sets then all sorts of red flags started to surface. Now, here's the kicker: it only took a couple of weeks until the new Chennai-based testers started to flag tests as passes even though they never ran them at all, which we discovered because we also added telemetry to track those.
Anecdotal evidence, but we only ceased to have problems with Chennai-based teams once we finished automating away their job.
There was a lot of top down forced offshoring with ultimatums like - hey you can have +4 headcount in Mumbai or +0 in NY.
Further, we found we had to spend $10Ks at a time to send NY/London staff over there monthly to figure out wtf was going on. These offshoring firms were running some serious scams. We once had a guy come back (mid 2000s) and say that his 5 devs in Hyderabad were equipped with 4 PCs and 3 phones between them!!
We had one bank offshore its datacenter ops (while the datacenter physically remained onshore). It was incredible. We'd have a RAID disk failure in a datacenter across the Hudson River in Jersey City, practically visible out my window, raise a ticket which would take 36 hours to get picked up by someone in India, to bounce around the globe and eventually get back to the onshore datacenter ops person who would do the physical disk replacement. Finally one ticket took so long to address that we had a cascade of disk failure and lost the whole RAID.
Just anecdote after anecdote of crazy stuff like this. Lot of these deals ended up in litigation.
There were many very smart developers over there, but the offshoring industrial system creates a race to the bottom and quantity over quality preference. With the turnover of good staff, the only way to keep the better ones was to get the visas sorted to nearshore them in US - largely defeating the purpose of the cost saving.
A lot of the banks moved away from this model and created "centers of excellence" in UK/US/Canada nearshore locations. You get competent staff for decent rates who are happy to have a great job without moving to the big city away from home/school/family. Not everyone who writes software wants to live in Bay Area/NYC/London. Time zones line up more humanely. Win win.