I will try to suppose where problems come from.
I have a customer, who asks us to alive a project.
Before that on the project work Indian programmers. We rewrite most of the code.
Why this happens?
He pay Indians $5/hr., we work with $25/hr.
Well paid people know languages, know how to program, they are certified, they can guarantee quality and etc.

Why most of USA companies try to hire low cost programmers and expect higher quality.
All of us at school study that quality is function of price. Most of us pay a lot of money for cars, dress, but are not ready to pay high rates for well qualified workers.
After that we are wondered what happens.

Before to begin to work with someone I send piece of our code.
If he/she can read our code and accept our style, we continue with him/her. Otherwise I can't take a risk after end of testing and project for every small change of code to appear quarrels.
Of course I have partners, which contract us for the support and refuse to make any changes in the code.

Venilina

>I only employed a Russian programmer once. Unfortunately the language issue became very difficult. I think my experience was not typical- in UT I can see that many Russian programmers are highly educated and often have a better understanding of English Grammar than their English-First-Language counterparts!
>
>I also have experience of using contract programming from India. Companies like Microsoft seem to do very well with this, but again we had bad experiences. I think there are important cultural differences, things we thought were "obvious" were not obvious. E.g. relationships between Doctors and Patients seem to be different in different cultures.
>
>Both these experiences were a while ago- > 7 years. Obviously things have continued to improve since then, there are now specialist companies who take on contract work, but prices are also rising and the cost advantage is not as great as it was.
>
>If I were to try again I'd be very careful to prepare extremely exact specifications. I'd insist on SDL (Software Development Lifecycle) participation.
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>One other issue: using contract development means the Intellectual Property and know-how is carried away by the contractor and lost to the company. For important IP or work that provides competitive advantage, better to employ people IMHO.
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>Regards
>
>JR