Timing, for one thing. For example, we have two sites in India; one of them works on Eastern time, the other on Indian time. The one that works Eastern time is a lot easier to deal with, as they are active when the rest of the US-based company is active. However, that means the Indian-based team is working nights, which makes it harder to retain good engineers.

The team that works on Indian time has good engineers, but with little overlap to the US-based management structure (and US-based engineers), there are sometimes significant delays in getting everyone on the same page.

That's one example, but there are others, such as cultural (i.e. expectations for US-based management may not be the same as non-US-based engineers) and "optics" (US-based customers like it better when US-based companies use US-based employees)

When an employee steals all your intellectual property, would you rather sue: 1) An American citizen in an American court 2) An Indian citizen in an Indian court