Yeah my experience has been abysmal. Now I have met engineers in the states from India who were some of the most brilliant people I’ve met, but the companies I’ve been at that offshored drove me crazy. Time complexity and DRY were things these individuals had never considered worthy of their time. These weren’t all cheap hires either: some of them were senior engineers making six figures

I was at a company that moved from an offshored setup to an offshored and outsourced one, and that was eye opening.

The offshore employees were, on aggregate, no better or no worse than their US counterparts. They were carefully recruited by a dedicated team, and all ended up with solid institutional knowledge because they were valued and retained over their careers. They even had decent advancement paths as well, including into management - I remember one guy in the office whose reporting chain went from him to Hyderabad - USA - Bangalore - USA. That had to be fun.

But then the outsourcing bug bit, teams were decimated in both countries, and that’s when I got to see the typical horror stories firsthand.

I’m careful now to ask people who talk about “offshoring” if they mean building a team of FTEs in another country, or hiring a body shop with the lie that they’ll handle the “non-core business tasks”.