I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and billed the client.
To be fair we did use clearcase for source control, but the outsourced teams were equally awful. There was a genuine concern that a lot of the team members out there were people's friends/family/neighbors because they never ever spoke in meetings (the lead would answer on their behalf if they were asked a question), and either we never saw any code from them or what we did was delivered slowly and was usually awful verbatim copy-paste work or simply just plain did not work.
Edited: this was _not_ exclusively from Indian IT firms.
In the pursuing interview/talk, my response to how I can build a team meant for the web/app was -- design alone is pretty meaningless, so let's create a team that understands designers' creativity and the power of engineering.
He thinks I was crazy because I told him I code my designs. Some of his words;
- "Designers should be shielded from Engineers, so their creativity is not limited."
- "I have avoided the other team and kept to my design team, and when the deliverables are passed-on, my job is done."
Of course, I looked up the guy later and learned that he has steadily grown his career like a well-designed graph, from an intern designer to the head of a design team in about 20 years.