It's a cycle.

The US is expensive, so offshore. Offshore projects are more expensive because they never work, so come back to the US.

I've lived it twice now. We’re in the middle of my third cycle.

Expect this cycle to be perm. The infrastructure, education and language barriers are completely gone now. This is my third cycle too, and its different this time.

In 2006 the Indians would randomly cut out, couldn't be on video (phone only) and had major language barriers, and they would join in their evening.

Now in 2024 you're on their schedule. Believe me, those people are not staying up late for your 3pm call. Wake up at 5am every day to keep your job, you have 3-4 hours to work with them.

Honestly to biggest issues I've had with overseas devs and managers (mostly India) is the lying and misrepresenting which is cultural.

Honestly the biggest issue is time difference. If US corpos were strategic they would have invested in Latin America and build huge talent pools there. Same time zone, same culture same holidays, same language with big portion of the US population.

Last go around my client used Brazil. Worked for a while until there was a major system outage and it turned out they didn't have the skill set to actually solve any problems.

You just pointed out all manufacturing migrated to China. Unions couldn't stop it (they probably accelerated it). So what would an IT union do?

The gap between experience, domain knowledge, and legacy knowledge. If you've ever worked in a large org that has been running for a few years these can be significant gaps and they are usually filled by having access to someone in the office to answer questions.

Work ethic and trust culture are big ones as well. Though admittedly some leaders love the "yes boss" vibe of overseas devs, even if they are lying to your face.