Kind of like making products out of crappier constituent parts seems really unimportant compared to the cost savings.
Does it make sense on the short term balance sheet? Of course. But, to quote Christmas vacation:
"Sometimes things look good on paper, but lose their luster when you see how it affects real folks. I guess a healthy bottom line doesn't mean much if to get it, you have to hurt the ones you depend on. It's people that make the difference. Little people like you."
This is assuming that programmers from countries with lower salaries are less competent, which is not always the case. It's harder and harder for workers in the developed world to justify that they are more productive than others. For millions of smart people around the world the hurdle to a better life is just the right visa or residence permit.
* Longer distances with more variance in connection quality degrades meetings and shared whiteboarding
* Timezones can destroy productivity if you let them, and need managing to not be a hindrance. If you want to run a complicated bit of SQL past a DB admin first, but your DB admin is 5 hours ahead of you and finished work already, you pay the cost of context switching and picking it up again tomorrow.
* Even if everyone speaks English, having a dozen different dialects and accents in one meeting doesn't help with comprehension, even moreso on dodgy connections.
* Cultural differences can be managed, but if you've got people from half a dozen different cultures on your team, you're gonna hit differences, some very difficult to surmount. And this is magnified with the lack of body-language communication you'd get in person.
It depends. If you have to redo the work multiple times because of miscommunications, that can easily eat up salary savings. If you can't hire the best people because of some of the aggravations involved, you may get a worse quality product or it may take a lot more time than you planned, or both.
Again, hiring someone remotely in the way you describe might well make a lot of sense. But it's not nearly the no-brainer you paint it as.
Does it make sense on the short term balance sheet? Of course. But, to quote Christmas vacation:
"Sometimes things look good on paper, but lose their luster when you see how it affects real folks. I guess a healthy bottom line doesn't mean much if to get it, you have to hurt the ones you depend on. It's people that make the difference. Little people like you."