Language and distance barriers are costs to outsourcing those folks. I don't care how skilled a developer is, or which direction the work is going (i.e. whether

Language and distance barriers are costs to outsourcing those folks. I don't care how skilled a developer is, or which direction the work is going (i.e. whether it's a US startup seeking to exploit, er, employ an Eastern European or vice versa). Unless you don't care about the quality of the code, those two factors matter a lot, and should be considered with much greater weight than they typically are (in my experience, at least), because the language and distance barriers will be additional factors in potential development that deviates from the requirements.