For complex jobs that require lot of focus and perseverance where the employee is going to be remote and on their own, yes - nothing other than a highly self mo

For complex jobs that require lot of focus and perseverance where the employee is going to be remote and on their own, yes - nothing other than a highly self motivated, talented individual will work out. But for the jobs that are moderately complicated and require a team - like in offshored projects for e.g. - giving that team their own local office to work, hiring a good manager to track their work/progress and provide local motivation, setting up communication infrastructure (Skype, Slack, Code Repositories, Bug Repos etc.), managing timing differences, having the team fly over to your main location or having your core team go visit them once in a while, identifying skill gaps and setting up training to address those, starting slow and initially giving team members clearly defined work which can be reviewed objectively and giving the team actionable feedback etc. can make it a whole lot easier down the line when workload increases and you can't afford low quality work. As an ongoing thing - communication becomes the main thing so making sure to have short, meaningful meetings to review, hear, appraise, provide feedback etc. are a must. (W.r.t communication - being clear and direct, not using culture specific lingo, making sure people understand what you are expecting from them and assigning timeline and ownership for key items verbally make a great difference.) And there's still attrition to deal with but it can be worked around by having well documented processes and keeping a good work environment. It sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing and some of these apply to local teams too. Finally keep in mind that you can't really magically escape all of s/w engineering problems just by having a local team - there's going to be complacent people, people with skills issues, communication problems etc. and the issues are not limited to remote teams although they do get harder to manage.