Even if you have an India/LATAM presence, the higher end of workers from those countries are still mostly migrating to other countries for higher salaries. So you still need H1Bs because you aren’t getting that person in their home country.
Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).
Not really. Countries like India are very large (population-wise) and have a very thriving domestic technology scene with a LOT of good talent. Not all of them want to migrate to other countries just for money. For the CoL in India, they are very well paid.
It is a level thing, even when I was working for Microsoft china, we could get lower level talent for cheap in India and China. But as the level rose, the costs became similar, and eventually the pay scale would flip (you could get a top level engineer in India, but they started costing the same or more than similar engineers in the Bay Area). So a $100k equiv engineer was cheaper, a $1 million equiv engineer was often more expensive. It really is a world market for talent at the high end, and the Bay Area has more of the top.
Up the skill tree, companies often really get what they pay for, so the saving on offshore work is that they were overpaying for some lower skilled tasks, but not the higher skilled tasks (it’s a world market for top talent).