In a piece about Boeing on the popular online magazine Slate summed up outsourcing work to foreign countries in one pithy sentence.

Outsourcing might be a cheaper route, but not if those savings are eaten up by timeline and cost overruns to fix mistakes made by overseas workers due to a lower skill levels or miscommunication.

At Curvine, most of our work is done in our office or with local designers & programmers who we can meet face to face. We have experimented with using folks from out of the country on specific projects. While the hourly rate is lower, the work takes longer both in terms of time to completion and billable hours. There are language barriers and quality of work issues which have to be solved. It isn’t that you can’t solve these problems (in fact, we have had one longterm HTML producer who has been the exception to this rule), it is just that it isn’t automatic and some or most of the cost savings is lost to these issues.

When do you think outsourcing to a foreign country is right? When is it not right?