back in the early 00's when I was in university I did some research assignments concerning the outsourcing and offshoring of it jobs in small and medium sized b

back in the early 00's when I was in university I did some research assignments concerning the outsourcing and offshoring of it jobs in small and medium sized businesses. The main gist of it is that most ended up switching back to local or hiring back part of the staff. The main problems I was told were: Cultural (mostly with eastern Europe) which introduces additional overhead due to cultural things not being equal especially for custom software for things like school districts as an example. You have to specify more which you assumed was common knowledge. Also things like meeting hours are somewhat more flexible in other places than in N/W Europe. Timezones: many things have been said about it but it didn't work for most companies combining Europe with (South)-East Asia. Ukraine and Russia was not a problem. Management capability: a managerial job locally is not the same remotely and most could not adapt or required more people offsetting the cost savings. This tended to count more for smaller businesses. Emotional: lack of affinity with the product, remote workers are counting just hours spend and thus the TCO was ignoring the hours local people spend in their own time working on the product. This is not a given for all but was one of the reasons companies switched back. These are just some examples. Most companies, especially the smaller ones, switched back to local hiring. Some made it work but not at the expected savings. The most successfull were the bigger businesses and my guess would be they had/took a longer time to prepare and hired the correct people for the job instead of relying on already hired employees which is not something you can always do in smaller businesses due to continuity. I really wonder what is going to be the effect this time as everybody is forced at least to train all the soft skills like remote communication and scheduling.