The slide said “access to global talent” and had a world map on it with arcs drawn between cities. Nobody in the room believed the map. Three weeks earlier a mid-level React req had been closed unfilled, the number on it had been $92,000 in a metro where that is not a mid-level number, and now there are six new names in the Slack workspace and a standup that starts at 8am because somebody has to give up their evening and it is not going to be the VP.
So, the question as r/webdev actually asks it: are there any legit reasons for hiring offshore developers, or is every stated reason a costume over wage arbitrage?
Start with the concession. In a large share of engagements, probably most, the reason is the rate. The decision gets made in a spreadsheet and the justification written afterwards, and “follow the sun” or “access to talent” gets typed into the deck by someone who has never been paged at 3am and could not name one scarce skill the team is missing. That gap between the real driver and the stated one is what makes the sceptics right, and it damages the credibility of the genuine reasons more than any failed engagement ever has.
Here is the test that separates the two. A legitimate reason for hiring offshore developers is one that would still hold if the rates were identical to your own. If the reason evaporates the moment the arbitrage does, it was a cost decision wearing a costume. Cost decisions are allowed. They just should be called by their name.
Run that test against the usual list and a few reasons survive. Most do not.
The reasons that survive a follow-up question
Four hold up, in my experience. Each has a test attached, and every test has the same shape: something outside the finance model has to depend on it.
A skill that is genuinely scarce in your local market, for a defined period. Not “senior engineers are hard to find”. A Rust engineer who has shipped an audited embedded bootloader, an Erlang maintainer, a video codec specialist, someone who has run a Kafka migration at your volume. The test has three parts and a real case passes all three: you can name the skill in one sentence, you can say roughly how many people within commuting distance have it, and you searched above your local median rather than at the bottom of the band. Fail the third and you did not have a scarcity problem. You had a budget you refused to move.
Coverage hours a customer contract actually requires. If you sell software with a one-hour P1 response commitment written into enterprise agreements, someone is awake at 4am your time. The alternatives are a night rotation that burns out your local team, or engineers for whom 4am your time is the middle of a working afternoon. The test: point at the signed clause, then at the pager schedule with names on it. Follow-the-sun that exists only in a deck fails instantly, and it is the most commonly faked reason in the category.
Language and market knowledge for a region you sell into. If a third of your revenue is in Brazil, an engineer in São Paulo who reads support tickets in Portuguese, understands Pix and knows which CPF validation edge cases actually occur is not cheaper labour, they are a different input. The test is whether they talk to your customers directly. If the “regional team” receives translated tickets and never speaks to a user, the rationale is decorative.
Capacity for work with a real end date. A data centre exit, a compliance deadline, a platform migration. Work needing eight people for seven months and two afterwards does not justify six permanent hires, and hiring permanently for a spike is how companies end up doing layoffs eighteen months later. The test: the end date exists in writing and somebody’s plan depends on it. “Ongoing capacity” on a rolling renewal is not project work, it is your engineering org with a different invoice.
Selling into a region is a reason on its own
This one gets left out of the argument entirely, and it has nothing to do with rates.
Companies selling into a region frequently need engineering and technical staff physically in that region for reasons that arrive from legal, procurement or the customer rather than from finance. Data residency commitments where the person operating the system must sit under the same jurisdiction as the data. Public-sector tenders requiring in-country support presence as a condition of bidding. Enterprise customers who want a named engineer on site within a day. Those engineers are often more expensive than the equivalent hire at head office, not less.
The tell is simple. Would the company still open the site if wages there were 20% higher than at home? For market-entry engineering the answer is frequently yes, because the driver is access to the market rather than the wage. That is the cleanest legitimate offshore hire there is, and almost never the one being argued about on Reddit, because it does not involve replacing anybody.
The reasons that fall apart when you push on them
“We couldn’t find anyone.” Usually true as stated and false as implied, because the missing clause is “at the price we offered”. BLS puts the May 2025 median wage for software developers in the United States at $135,980, with the bottom 10% under $82,460 and the top 10% above $214,670. In computer systems design and related services specifically, the median is $132,050. An employer who advertised $95,000 for a mid-level role, got thin applications and concluded the talent does not exist has run an experiment that answers a different question. Meanwhile US institutions roughly doubled computer and information sciences degree production between 2013 and 2023, from about 51,500 to 114,100 at bachelor’s level, according to NSF’s STEM Talent report. There is no shortage of people who can write CRUD endpoints. There is a shortage who will write them for $32 an hour.
“Follow the sun.” A genuine version means work handed over at the end of one shift and picked up by the next: written handover, shared ownership of the same services, someone in each zone who can decide without waiting. Almost nobody runs that. What usually exists is a team in another time zone working normal local hours on separate tickets with no handover and no out-of-hours coverage, which is not follow-the-sun, it is a team somewhere else. The question that ends the discussion: who is on the pager between midnight and 6am, and what is their name?
“We need to scale fast.” Sometimes true. More often the constraint is not headcount but the number of people who can specify work, review it and decide, and that number does not change when you add engineers three time zones away. It gets worse, because every new person consumes scarce reviewing capacity before producing anything. If the backlog is stalled because nobody has written the acceptance criteria, six more developers produce six more implementations of an unwritten requirement. Test: name the bottleneck. If the honest answer is “our staff engineer”, adding people below them does not help, and adding them at a distance helps least of all.
The cost argument deserves a hearing, not a sneer
Treating cost as an illegitimate reason is its own kind of dishonesty. Wage differences between countries are enormous and well documented, and a business that ignores a structural input cost is not being principled, it is being careless with money that pays other people’s salaries too.
The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, the largest public dataset here with 49,000-plus respondents across 177 countries and 23,928 answering the compensation questions, puts the self-reported median for back-end developers at $175,000 in the United States against $22,086 in India. Those are self-reported medians of whole national markets with very different experience distributions, so read them as an indication of the gap rather than a price for an engineer. The gap is not an illusion.
What is an illusion is the size of the saving in most business cases, because the model compares a US salary against a vendor bill rate and stops. Two things are missing.
The first is what an employee actually costs. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation put total employer compensation for private industry workers at $46.89 per hour worked in June 2026, of which wages and salaries were $32.82, or 70.0%, and benefits $14.07, or 30.0%. Apply that ratio to a $135,980 developer salary and the loaded cost is roughly $194,000. That makes the offshore comparison look better, not worse, and finance is right to include it.
The second is everything the arrangement consumes that never reaches an invoice. The arithmetic below uses my own assumptions, which you should change to match your situation, because the shape matters more than the numbers. One offshore developer billed at $35 an hour for 1,800 hours is $63,000 against $194,000 loaded locally, a headline saving of 68%. Add six hours a week of a senior local engineer on specification, review and unblocking at roughly $108 an hour loaded, across 46 weeks: about $29,800. Add re-ramping when the named person rotates off after ten months, say five weeks of lost output: $6,800. Add a 10% rework allowance: $6,300. Total roughly $106,000, and the saving is now about 45%.
Forty-five percent is still a large number, and anyone telling you the saving is fake has not done the sum. Notice what the overhead is denominated in, though. Not dollars. Senior engineering attention, the resource you had least of before you started, and no spreadsheet has a line for it.
What the sceptics have right
Three things, and I am not going to soften any of them.
The training pipeline takes real damage. The work that travels best to a remote team is work specifiable in writing with no requirement to hold an opinion: endpoints against a documented schema, screens built from a finished design, test automation, a framework upgrade, bug tickets with clean reproduction steps. That is very nearly the list of tasks a first-year developer used to be handed. Nobody designed “fix forty small bugs in a codebase you did not write” as a curriculum, but it worked as one. Export the rung and the ten-year bill is not fewer juniors, it is fewer seniors, drawn from a pool everyone hires out of and nobody refills.
Offshore teams are routinely used to avoid fixing engineering management. If requirements arrive half-written, review takes four days, priorities change weekly and nobody owns the definition of done, a distant team does not cause that problem, it reveals it. The honest response is to fix the management. The common response is to add a vendor, because a vendor can be blamed and a director cannot. It is the failure mode I have seen most often and the one nobody puts in the retrospective.
Cost-led engagements produce exactly the quality their incentives pay for. When the selection criterion is rate, the supplier’s margin is the gap between the price and the hours burned, which makes refactoring, deleting dead code and telling you a ticket is a bad idea all unpaid work. The resulting code is a rational output of the contract, not evidence about anyone’s competence. Buying on price and then being surprised by the quality is not bad luck.
What a legitimate arrangement looks like from the outside
You can usually tell within one meeting. The legitimate version has these properties, and the cost-led version fails at least three of them.
- Named individuals, retained long term. They are in your directory, their real name is in the commit log, and the contract says how much notice you get before anyone rotates. Interchangeable seats with a headcount number is the opposite.
- Direct communication. Your engineers talk to their engineers. No account manager relay, no analyst rewriting requirements in between, no summary of a demo instead of the person who built it showing the thing.
- Genuine overlap hours, with the pain shared. Three or four hours, fixed, written down, both sides giving up something. If the whole adjustment is made by the side with less power, that is the reason showing through.
- The same code review bar. One definition of done, one CI pipeline, one standard, reviewed by people outside the supplier’s P&L. A separate quality track for “the vendor work” is an admission.
- Paid a fair rate for their local market, not the floor. Ask what proportion of the bill rate the engineer receives. A supplier who will not say is telling you something, and so is a rate that cannot support anything above the local median.
- It survives a price rise. The best single test I know: if a 15% rate increase would end the arrangement, cost was never a secondary factor, it was the whole reason. Say so and stop pretending.
Where this leaves the question
I do not think this argument is settled and I would distrust anyone who says it is. Reasonable people weigh the same facts differently depending on whether they are looking at a company’s obligations to its shareholders, to its local labour market, or to the twenty-three-year-old who cannot get a first job. Different questions, different answers, and collapsing them into one is how these threads go bad.
What I will say without hedging: legitimate reasons exist, they are rarer than the decks claim, and each has a test a cost story fails. Scarcity you can name. A clause you can point at. A market you sell into. An end date somebody’s plan depends on.
And the practical note, since it is what the original question is really circling. If you suspect your employer’s stated reason is a cost story in a costume, you are probably right. That instinct is well calibrated; the arcs on the map are usually drawn after the decision, not before it. Knowing it does not change the decision. It does mean you can stop wondering whether you are being unfair and start asking which of the tests above the arrangement actually passes, which is a far more useful conversation to have with your manager than the one about whether offshoring is good.
Now the disclosure, which you should weigh heavily. AB7 Solutions is a staffing and outsourcing company, one of the suppliers this article is about, so our coming out in favour of arrangements being run properly is not a surprising finding and you have every reason to discount this paragraph. What we do is the named-individual end: staff augmentation, contract staffing and C2C placements where you interview the person, you keep the definition of done, the overlap hours are in the agreement, and rotation notice is written down rather than discovered. If you are working out whether your reason is one of the four that hold up, or what a properly structured engagement costs once review and ramp time are in the model, that is worth talking through before you sign anything: +1 321 341 7733, ab@ab7solutions.com, director@ab7solutions.com, or www.ab7solutions.com. If the honest answer is that you should hire locally, or that you do not have a staffing problem at all, we would rather say so than sell you a pod.
Sources: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers (May 2025 wage data, including percentile and industry medians; 2025 employment of 1,905,400 and 2025 to 2035 projections); BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 (private industry, $46.89 per hour total, wages 70.0%, benefits 30.0%); National Science Foundation NCSES, STEM Talent: Education, Training, and Workforce, February 2026 (US computer and information sciences degree awards, 2013 to 2023; 36 million STEM workers in 2023, 22% foreign born); Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey (49,000+ self-selected respondents across 177 countries, 23,928 compensation responses, self-reported). The cost comparison uses my own stated assumptions, not survey data.