I did an electricity project with developers from the Ukraine. We spent a week being confused because the Ukrainiens expected the electricity bill to be calculated based on the size of your house and how many animals you have. The concept of a domestic electricity meter was completely foreign to them.
I also worked with a Ukrainian graphic designer who had no understanding of copyright law.
US devs are highly overestimating the value of being American. They don't understand that a Ukrainian dev working at 80% performance because of cross-cultural issues for 50% salary is still a good deal. And when the company becomes international then the whole argument becomes reversed because the US devs become a minority and it's them who fails to adjust to others. Sure, it's difficult to hire a good dev from abroad, but when this gets done right, it saves a ton of money. For example, an American company can buy a smaller, healthy foreign company, and with the company, all the knowledge of operating in the local job market.
There are tons of posts on Reddit "I'm American and I graduated in Computer Science and I was promised $200k jobs but I can't get hired at all" from people who fail to understand basic economics of big companies.
One of my professors used to work at RadioShack and they had large teams in India. The software quality was good, but the interoperability was really, really bad. Not surprising since communication was awful due to time zone differences.
She, and her team in America, spent a huge amount of time normalizing their output to the American output. And you have to go in that direction because the company is in America.
Outsourcing makes the hard part harder.
If you completely misunderstood what your manager wanted, would your productivity be 80% or close to 0?
What are you talking about? Private apartments and houses in Ukraine had domestic electricity meters installed since soviet times.