[robjan]

When you offshore cost is the main factor and the companies optimise for it. As an example you may have an offshoring contract with Infosys where you pay around $20/hour/head and they provide mostly freshgrads (some times referred to as "commodity developers") with dubious qualifications. But you can say you have 100 engineers on the project. When hiring internationally you usually hire and interview a specific person and pay them well through Deel (or equivalent). All of the former engagements have been a disaster, the latter have mostly worked out.

Both have their benefits. In my experience offshore teams are basically an army that you need to train and provide a lot of direction. It can be very frustrating but if you have code generators, Sonarqube, linters and they are only working on CRUD applications it sometimes works out. Whereas international hires are usually very competent because you personally selected them.