I had a positive experience a few years back with a small agency located in Bhubaneswar in Odisha. Our company started working with them because we needed a ma

I had a positive experience a few years back with a small agency located in Bhubaneswar in Odisha. Our company started working with them because we needed a mass-production job done quickly: we needed a whole mess of paper health-care forms converted to Acrobat (pdf) forms. We quickly discovered that this particular agency assigned a staff member who worked to really understand the forms and imagine the workflow of the people using them. The forms (PDF forms really are programs) we got back were excellent. They actually made the work of filling them out faster than the old paper forms. So we inquired whether they could do other development work for us. That turned into a good relationship. We went into the relationship not thinking "how do we get the cheapest possible programming labor?" but rather "how do we add to our company's capacity to get all these @##*% forms converted?". We started assigning low-risk tasks. And, after three years or so they were great colleagues. We gave them good references and they got other work partly as a result. We did daily "scrum" calls, early in the morning US time and at the end of their workday India time. Somebody went to visit them once a year. In other words, we treated them like colleagues. It's all about people and relationships. I believe classic cost-driven "outsourcing" contract deals -- the kind of stuff that's driven by finance executives -- have contributed to India-based agencies' struggles with reputation. Would you hire a kid fresh out of Carnegie Mellon and tell him "you have your job because you're cheaper than our other developers?" No. So why would you say that to a kid fresh out of an excellent Indian university? I believe the Odisha location was helpful, because turnover was lower than it might have been in Bengaluru or Mumbai. Plus, Odisha is a really cool place to visit. That's one story.