This is probably similar as self-hosting some services vs letting someone else deal with it. Hosting something like Elasticsearch requires a lot of knowledge and understanding. If you run it yourself it's free! So you end up doing it yourself, but really you'll need to spend engineering hours on it. Engineers being one of the most expensive expense in a business, you've suddenly not really saved much, and you'd have been better off having Elastic do it for you, and you could have started using it in less than a week rather than months.

To add something similar: I've seen non-tech companies that have no ability to evaluate or mentor tech staff, hire 3-4 junior people at the lowest rate they can find... they all struggle and have no one to ask, tons of incomplete or barely working projects... The workload could be done by 1 competent mid-level dev... costing half what they're paying for those people. But the company is happy because they got a good deal and didn't have to pay "ridiculous" tech salaries.

We had a project last April where the lead dev was getting a lot of abuse from management about "Why isn't it done yet, I thought the outsourcer already did all this". I've never wanted to scream at someone more in my entire employment history. It was taking so long precisely because the outsourcer did all of it, and he was having to spend all his time undoing it. It actively cost more money and dev time than if they had never hired them in the first place.

Yeah, I get the feeling a lot of times that outsourcing is popular with dysfunctional companies because it shifts a portion of the labor, and thus the resources to managerial staff in the rich country, and the remainder is spent on the actual talent.

If you're a US based manager, this is great. You suddenly become that much more valuable to your employer, even though the customer will lose out. Plus, you don't have to deal with that smart chick down the hall who knows how to code and makes you look really dumb and lazy in meetings getting more glory with the bosses.

The more bureaucratic the org and removed from customers the success criteria are, the more likely it'll get outsourced.

> Even a developer in the EU will cost half that of silicon valley

Is there another Europe I missed?

I do (consider myself paid unfairly)! :)