I've worked alongside (but never with) offshore developers, often from the big consultancy companies. One thing they tend to do is place one competent developer and a dozen less-so, so that the work gets done by the one but they get paid for a dozen people.
But I also believe the managers hiring offshore employees are fully aware of this. If they aren't then they're not very good managers and/or have no idea what they're doing.
The offshore people mainly work on SAP and legacy systems though; it turns out it's very hard to find willing or competent people in Europe that actually want to work on / with SAP. However, foreign workers have less qualms about learning stuff like that, since the money is really good.
Yes this is the agency model here in Croatia. You would get one senior developer covering 2-3 projects and a few junior/mid developers working full time.
I have a feeling it's not working that well anymore because the people covering those juniors just earn more going to work straight for the client and they have less burden on them. Used to be harder so the agencies had leverage, nowadays even big companies will hire individual B2B contractor.
The only management experience I've had was as a team lead at a US-based consulting company. It was really stressful because I felt like I was managing a team that wasn't capable of doing the work. I was expected to spend at least some of my time coding, and was responsible for the overall project. This is the first time it has occurred to me that this might have been intentionally set up to exploit me while maximizing the amount we can charge the client.
> this might have been intentionally set up to exploit me while maximizing the amount we can charge the client
This was the sense I got from a friend's situation: he works for a consulting firm managing a large offshore team billed as "Oracle Experts" who are in reality completely incompetent. (Side note: How would a bunch of young third-world devs go about mastering a niche technology to the expert level?) The offshore team meets their contractual obligation by committing nonsense SLOC everyday that contains vague references to the requirements. But as the quarters roll by, it never actually meets requirements. So my friend learned the only way to deliver is for him to personally implement the solutions while juggling semi-daily meetings with the clients and the offshore team. The client is happy in the end, but it all takes a lot longer than it would he could drop the offshore team entirely.
In this situation, the value of the offshore team is they make the client believe that 1) their problems can only be solved by a large team and 2) they are paying less for this team than they would otherwise.
we couldn't find good SAP security folks to save our life at a previous job. 900/hr for consultants.
regular "line" SAP admins had to be found in Mexico and brought up on TN visas -- still well paid but generally pretty good, doubly so because we had a Mexico City office and could retain the staff even after they rotated back to MX.