I've seen it work well when an existing relationship exists between the company doing the outsourcing and the programmers being outsourced to. In our case, we

I've seen it work well when an existing relationship exists between the company doing the outsourcing and the programmers being outsourced to. In our case, we have some Russian programmers working for us. They used to be permanent employees here, but have since moved back to Russia. The quality is known (high), and deadlines are met. However, whenever any of the big outsourcing companies have been involved it has always been a disaster: More expensive than local when the project finally reaches completion (that's if it does), incredibly variable rates of quality, poor communication, continual programmer attrition.