I'm currently working with a client that needed more capacity than I could offer, so they hired an offshore team to take on some contracting work. The offshore

I'm currently working with a client that needed more capacity than I could offer, so they hired an offshore team to take on some contracting work. The offshore team has been professional, knowledgeable, and able to produce high-quality, well-tested, well-commented code. The difference is that they're several times more expensive than the "bottom of the barrel" cheapest coders you can find in their country, while still being a bargain by US standards. Meanwhile I've worked with lowest-bid, US-based contractors in the past, and their work has been reliably bad. So I'd put forward that the tendency to "cheap out" is the culprit behind poor quality, rather than outsourcing. Practically, the two often go hand-in-hand since the cheapest developers are often abroad, but the two needn't be conflated, and recognizing the nuance opens up the door to working with a high-quality, international pool of talent.