Sure. One company I worked with was actually US-based with PMs and high level architects scattered all over the Midwest and the actual dev team in Ukraine. The

Sure. One company I worked with was actually US-based with PMs and high level architects scattered all over the Midwest and the actual dev team in Ukraine. They were very up front about it from the get go and once they realized we don't beat around the bush too much once the SOW was signed they started inviting the dev team to our status meetings and offered that we get hold of the devs directly if we would like to when needed. Which was awesome since most of the outsourced shops I've dealt with in the past would only have us deal with the PM and a couple of high-level SAs. And then if you do manage to get hold of their tech team they won't be overly responsive and typically you'd need 3 or 4 of the devs to get a complete picture of what's going on or to solve the issue you're having. Another company was based in Ukraine altogether with no US presence. Same deal basically, little rougher English-wise but not too bad, their chief SA worked in the States in the past so he would jump in to clarify things if need be. Where those guys really shine is understanding things end-to-end no matter what the role on the particular project entails. I'd be talking to a front-end developer about some symptoms I'm seeing and he'd be troubleshooting down to the wire basically - dumping proxy logs, generating wireshark captures etc etc.