As a developer for a US based software company, I have experienced some of the differences first hand. We recently tried to farm out a near impossible task to a

As a developer for a US based software company, I have experienced some of the differences first hand. We recently tried to farm out a near impossible task to an Indian company. They, as most of these companies do, promised everything we asked, and built in some contractual loop holes to protect themselves. The code we received is crap. It doesnt really follow our architecture, and will probably take just as long to clean up as it would to rewrite. That said, I think the problem is that managers think code just needs to be "typed up" to work. Developers are viewed as interchangeable cogs and not technical assets. I'm actually amazed the "port" came out as well as it did with the set of circumstances we presented the company. I work with 3 Indian expats who are all very competent developers, I would say among the best I have worked with. Its just the combination of distance, cultural difference, and lack of problem domain familiarity that causes outsourcing to fail, not bad developers.