It's tricky. Being 2x better means 1/2 time to delivery, 1/2 maintenance burden, 2x more flexible software, and 1/2 the management burden, and very often all at

It's tricky. Being 2x better means 1/2 time to delivery, 1/2 maintenance burden, 2x more flexible software, and 1/2 the management burden, and very often all at the same time. It's also much harder to find cream of the crop workers in cultures you are less familiar with, so the average case (where some people are quite bad at it) is, from what I've seen, a little larger than 2x. Maybe 3-4x, sometimes more? And compounding across all those disadvantages (2x more work to make a change due to worse design, 2x times slower because of lower skill, with every week needing 2x as much management, slowed down by the extra daily operations and keeping-things-going, can be... a lot), it can actually work out to be a worse deal unless you're pretty careful. Personal experience shows that this involves both careful hiring and on the job training.