the V&V work to India. It was a massive headache and we got in trouble with not getting our testing all covered. Had to ramp up to 100% oversight over everything India was doing and take over a lot of it. It ended up costing us more instead of less.

It was the first time in my career I'd seen that since I'd come over to commercial from defense, and I learned a valuable lesson about cheaper not always being better. The language, cultural and time zone differences you have to navigate often eat up all the base wage cost savings. You end up with higher turnover because of the weird hours you make your team hold meetings to, and people get tired of the extra mental strain trying to understand thick accents and strange emails and burn out faster. Plus, cultures like China and India place high value on coming up with sneaky ways to get around things they need to do.

Sure there are specific times/projects it may make sense on a small scale, but wholesale outsourcing appears to be a losing strategy near as I can tell.