Assuming you are compared to an equally skilled (but 3 times cheaper dev) i would say that being close to your lead gives you an advantage since you can 'bug' h

Assuming you are compared to an equally skilled (but 3 times cheaper dev) i would say that being close to your lead gives you an advantage since you can 'bug' him any time of the day and ask for guidance and adjust the direction you are going (with your task) on the fly. It's no fun spending a week on the task (for dev and for lead) to find out in the end that you've not done it right and you (of the lead) has to rewrite everything. You can leverage that to move 3 times faster then an offshore dev :) but this is just speculation ...