I worked for a company in Budapest that was one of these outsourced dev teams. Actually, it was OUR dev team, who our CTO bought from us. He then started a new company with this dev team, and sold their dev skills to us, and a bunch of other companies around the world.

Now, we had a great team of young Hungarian guys and gals - about 20 of them - that were at the cutting edge of technology in a country still waking up from long hibernation under Communism. Most these kids were like 10 when the Iron Curtain fell, so they had no real understanding of what living in a communist country was like... they just grew up in a depression where there were no jobs and their grandparents lived on cat food.

So being in a high-tech job, making a high-tech salary and benefits, and working with international companies was a HUGE thing for them.

Which, once the CTO spun them off into a separate dev shop, quickly went away and it became a low-cost, low-overhead, hackathon dev that did anything for a buck.

That's the problem with us tech industry types. We have these big altruistic ideas that we get rolling, and then we go back to focusing on our work and leave the operational details to the suits and useless MBAs, and it all goes to shit.