I am an offshore worker (I live in Europe and generally work for American companies) and make a good deal less than Americans with the same job (but more than I would at a European company) - it’s not just outsourcing for 10% the cost to a developing country.
Sure, but many companies outsourcing aren't looking for the best, they are looking for the cheapest, and surprise-surprise the cheapest are not the best. Some of them are goddamn awful - close to zero value, but upper management typically never hears about that and just thinks they are saving money because they are cheap.
There is also a big difference in mindset between an employee hoping to advance their career at a company, trying to become a SME, pushing initiatives, incentivized by stock grants, actually caring about customers, etc, and a vendor employee - even a good one - to who this is just a temporary gig, and has no vested interest in the quality of the codebase or building value for the company.
In many companies there is little flow of real information from the bottom up. Upper management only hears what everyone understands they want to hear.
If the top down message is "this is the direction, make it work", and people further down in the hierarchy understand that the boss doesn't want to hear that his plan (e.g. hire the cheapest to save money) isn't working, then he is not going to hear it.
Companies don't even care, honestly. Some have uptime requirements that they get fined over if things go sideways, but besides that, they don't even care.
