Unpopular opinion: the offshore industry discourse is about five years behind reality.
Everyone's still arguing about whether offshoring is "good or bad" as a concept while the actual industry has quietly moved on to entirely different questions.
Nobody serious is offshoring just to cut costs anymore. That's table stakes. The conversation has shifted to: can they actually do the complex work? Do they own outcomes or just log hours? What does their security posture look like? Are they specialists or generalists pretending to be?
The next five years are going to be genuinely interesting. AI is pushing offshore teams into higher-value work — not replacing them, just changing the job description. Outcome-based contracts are replacing the old "pay for time and hope for results" model. Blended onshore-offshore teams have become completely normal. And the businesses that treat vendor selection like a strategic decision rather than a procurement exercise are getting noticeably better results.
The gap between a great offshore partner and a mediocre one is wider than most people realize until they've experienced both.