My experience working at a startup that started out outsourced and slowly started adding inhouse developers:
It was mostly a mess.
1) Time/Cultural/Language barriers are inevitably the biggest problem. Want an answer to something critical right now? Too bad, it's 2 AM there and no one's around.
You're going to end up scheduling meetings at insane hours, and someone's going to get burned out on that.
I also had the fortune of watching an email thread where someone used a colloquialism ("Move it over just a smidge") and it took three days to resolve (because of the time differences) what that meant.
2) This is going to sound super snotty, but I'll just say it: There was a definite feeling of "you're still over there because you're not good enough for anyone to sponsor you for an H1B".
In general the really talented developers I met left quickly because they found someone willing to sponsor them. What was left was... well, what was left.
The salary gap is so severe that it becomes a lot harder to say "I want to stay near my family and friends." If someone offered me 100x my current salary to move to, well, anywhere, I'd be packed in 5 minutes.
It was mostly a mess.
1) Time/Cultural/Language barriers are inevitably the biggest problem. Want an answer to something critical right now? Too bad, it's 2 AM there and no one's around.
You're going to end up scheduling meetings at insane hours, and someone's going to get burned out on that.
I also had the fortune of watching an email thread where someone used a colloquialism ("Move it over just a smidge") and it took three days to resolve (because of the time differences) what that meant.
2) This is going to sound super snotty, but I'll just say it: There was a definite feeling of "you're still over there because you're not good enough for anyone to sponsor you for an H1B".
In general the really talented developers I met left quickly because they found someone willing to sponsor them. What was left was... well, what was left.
The salary gap is so severe that it becomes a lot harder to say "I want to stay near my family and friends." If someone offered me 100x my current salary to move to, well, anywhere, I'd be packed in 5 minutes.