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”.