I’ve been a part of the entire arc of offshored teams since the trend started in the late 90’s early 00’s. I’ve never seen it work. The primary issue is and always has been time zone related. While it doesn’t show to an accountant we do live on a sphere and there are implications to everyone. The solution is always to find some self contained effort for the remote centers but it never works because the entire company is pulling together and short of making the remote teams spin offs there’s no way to disentangle dependencies. And at some level even if you could management has to work cross regionally which isolates them from their center of power in the home office time zone. The root is the company is asking you to make immense personal sacrifice so they can save money if the model were to work. There is no upside to anyone other than the remote management in this situation so they burn out quickly and still fail because literally no one else in the company cares in any meaningful way. It’s unfair at its core and therefore fails.

The issues of quality and whatnot are at their core racist IMO but are made real because of the timezone issue. The norms and culture expected in the home time zones don’t translate easily and result in an impedance mismatch and a different measure of “good.” Because the remote team is isolated and unempowered they always struggle to adopt the standard of the team and to some extent can’t ever succeed in the quality space as it’ll be an ever shifting goalpost whose reasoning is effectively hidden. Then layer in the latent resentment on both sides and the whole situation is bound to fail, but the home teams have the advantage of being resident with the only management that matters.

I wish everyone involved would realize the experiment has failed. But CFOs are too powerful in most companies large enough to reasonably pull off outsourcing at all and the need for the CEO to please boards and investors who just operating off the financial statements and HBR white papers are too disconnected for why these efforts fail.

Unfortunately the current persecution of immigrants in the US will drive these arrangements more and more. Rather than on shoring local foreign talent with the collocated team, foreign talent will opt to avoid the fear society being birthed. This will lead to a strong incentive to follow talent to their home country leading to more imbalance in talent disoriented time zones. Maybe this would require everyone to figure out the above issues but I seriously doubt it. I think it’ll just make everyone less effective and not achieve anything positive for anyone.

100%. Most of the planet is cheaper than the US, and has been for decades. That being the case, how are there so many knowledge workers here still?