That person is either incredibly naive or dishonest. If she's naive, she should start by asking herself why is she paid multiple times what someone doing the same job in Hyderabad is.
In reality a common cultural background (i.e. how to approach some kind of work) is a lot more important than a lot of managers want you to believe. Outsourcing also requires extensive planning and management, which increases the number of managers required and thus increases the costs of outsourcing.
E.g. VW tried outsourcing over the last 10 years and is now recruiting developers en masse in Germany because it failed to make it work.
Except for the fact that it's not outsourcing to the lowest bidder like companies tried back then.
Pretty much every major American tech company has a development center in India. The developers working here are employees of the parent company. They have the same or functionally similar culture as the HQ.
And the cost advantage has significantly shrunk because of the booming local startup scene.
No matter how you slice it, it’s very hard to get people to feel like they’re all on the same team. It can happen, but it take tremendous time and effort. If you’re ever interviewing and someone insists that using an outsourced development firm or Indian development center will only cost 30% as much as those close to the HQ - I’d recommend walking out. Because it’s clear they don’t understand (or perhaps care) about the true economics.
Rinse and repeat.
EDIT: by which I mean that the issue is more deep than just how to manage people. Managing an existing talent pool seems to part of the picture.
What the crews on the machine room think about the deal hardly matters.
Time difference: this can be mitigated for North America by using teams in South America, but scale is typically limited, The time difference in India is brutal for everyone, you end up having small windows of time to communicate synchronously either early or late, people are typically tired when this communication happens, either just waking up and trying to get their kids to school/ family going or trying to go to sleep so they can wake up early for another call… which leads to sleep deprivation!
One way around this is key individuals who have strong people + technical skills spend significant amounts to of time at the start of projects in North America(assuming it is a NA centric project) this allows them to fully immerse and absorb the nuances of the people, product, requirements and politics of the program, this is expensive and can be challenging from a visa perspective, any project I’ve worked on that has succeeded started with this.