Has this meme ever been a real thing? I know quite a few people who've made entire careers off of fixing the mistakes these outsourced "cheap" Indian make in their work, cheap being in quotes because the end result is that you have to pay someone more, for far longer to fix up the crap they leave in their wake.
Besides if it's cheap enough to hire someone overseas (who by definition would be remote), how would it not be cheaper to just pay their current workforce to work remotely?
A half answer here is, given "agile devops" software development (i.e. developing with iterative tradeoffs on both features and operational stability), then regular meeting time matters a lot to resolve conflict, and so working time zone matters a lot. The more spread, and the more you get people blaming "not good enough processes" on what is really just "not enough common time to meet to collaborate".
Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.
So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.
1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.
2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.
3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).
4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.
5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.
If your boss can save on your wages and the cost of office space by hiring a guy in India you'd think employing you in an office would be even less appealing than employing you to work from home...
English as a first language. Implicit shared cultural values. Time zones. You are way less work to manage than someone across the world from another culture.
Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.
I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.