“How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us” gives a glimpse into some some of the issues with “offshoring” :

“What are my options if my highly productive, 15-person software team generates only one-third the output our customers demand? I was certain that augmenting our team with offshore development was the right answer. It wasn’t, at least for a small project we recently outsourced to an Indian firm. ”

although anecdotal and difficult to generalize to all cases, it’s a good reminder that going overseas isn’t always the right answer and when it is the right answer, it’s more difficult to execute properly than you might imagine. i suspect after a year or so of the pendulum swinging in favor of offshoring, we’ll see more failures reported and the system will moderate itself a bit more than it has of late. [ via dangerousmeta ]