I’ve worked with awful, stereotypically garbage offshore teams. I’ve worked with quality offshore teams. The difference was money. The quality teams made less than, but nearly as much as an American worker. Maybe not a FAANG guy or a New York / SF worker, but all those small cities in flyover states? They came in 20-30k under, perhaps.

Language l, cultural, and time barriers still come into play regardless of how good they are, however.

Likewise! Though Latin American engineers also tend to be some of the priciest offshore developers (along with European engineers). Excellent engineers, but there's still some churn from the friction of hiring and maintaining teams overseas.

As posted above, we had great success with Mexican hires out of Mexico City.

General perception was the universities there produced qualified graduates who were not paper tigers (or didn't lie about creds).

Rates for them were pretty good, and we had better alignment with timezones and holidays.

Reasonably good alignment in terms of legal and HR issues -- easier to enforce than, like, Bangladesh

The NAFTA / USMCA / whatever its called now Visa made it easy for them to come across the border for a few years as well. Pay bump for a while plus a chance to work in HQ or the IT office directly, make fat stacks, and then rotate back to MX and buy a nice house. The Mexico City PMs were also instrumental for bridging the language gap when running projects in other LATAM countries.

Trump's ICE might be the end of that approach tho

We find it incredibly hard to hire these people. It turns out a lot of US companies are also interested in smart, capable, cheap engineers in Central Time Zone.