All of the things you wrote can certainly be true. I can give you a perfect example of some of the “follow the instruction to the letter” idiocy I have seen in the past:
We sent a mock-up over to offshore with an area highlighted in yellow saying, “Change this area to [x]!” When we got the work back in the morning, not only did they change to [x], there was now a nice yellow box around that part of the web page. *facepalm*
On the flip side, I had a guy who would spend two hours at the end of each day writing fairly explicit instructions to his team of 3 offshore resources. For that 2 hours investment, he got 24 hours worth of productive work. Nice lever.
The key is to find a firm that you can trust and that understands you aren’t going to take any BS. Then, once you have a good rapport with a company that has a decent bench, you can say, “I need 4 people in a week for a 6 week project.”
Some of the posters here who think I can get that domestically are living in fantasy land. I’ve had open FTE reqs that took MONTHS to fill because IT unemployment is so low where I am. (Some are saying it is now *negative* in my market, which makes sense given that I’ve actually imported 4 of my last 5 FTEs from other states.)
So, call me a “traitor” if you want, but my company needs the job to get done. If hiring domestic resources will take us months for a job that could be *completed* by offshore in the same time, which do you think we’ll pick to grow the business?
Also - for the record - this model HAS grown my FTE staff by more than double in the past two years, and this is not a small department.
So - while I absolutely *despise* Trump - he is actually right: outsourcing creates jobs in the long run.