Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe.
I know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless companies for slightly cheaper than senior London prices.
India, middle east, south asia has been an absolute nightmare every time we tried.
I think the future of outsourcing is going to be Russia: they can't speak English if their life depended on it but they're capable developers and paid ridiculously low. A few more years and people will start being a bit more fluent in English.
This is still assuming the USA and Europe will still have any relevance - maybe they should start learning Chinese.
Eastern Europe is not hit or miss: there are skilled people and the rest; companies hired the skilled people a long time ago, then started to hire people with no skills because "they had plans and targets to meet" and complain they are not so good? The IT market is vacuumed, people with basic skills are hired to fill roles of seniors, hiring managers have recruiting targets and quality is not one.
If we want to generalize, Russia is in Eastern Europe, as is Kazakhstan or Ukraine. (Yes, I'm aware some of these have also huge area in Asia.)
On the other hand it's more useful to classify countries like Hungary or Poland as Central Europe, because of timezone and because they have been EU members for more than 15 years.
There is just less difference between Warsaw and Berlin than between Warsaw and Moscow, so the old dichotomy First World vs non-First World is no longer that useful to understand what's going on.
Of course there is a distribution of talent in any industry and geography. However, in my experience, there are dev cultural attitudes (especially DIY-ness) that make Eastern Europe and Russia ideal for hacking.
Example: I had a relatively complex ticket with a new dev to my team located in Russia with sparse documentation. I scheduled a call to do a deep-dive how the system works and I got a rather laconic reply:
As my handle would imply I've spend most of my career in Japan. Paradoxically some of the best coders among Japanese are the worse English speakers--perhaps an inverse-correlation. It's not uncommon to see code comments in Japanese (or Chinese for that matter in China.)
The Chinese are consumate pragmatics.
I think that it is more probable that we will be thinking of english as ONE OF the chinese languages 100 years from now than they forcing mandarim to us.
Eastern Europe is hit or miss. I had some good experiences and plenty of terrible ones (more so recently). I think that eastern Europe used to be good, but there are plenty of actors milking the scene and reputation of eastern Europe. I know 2 smart fellas making bank selling remote junior developers from Hungary and Poland to London clueless companies for slightly cheaper than senior London prices.
India, middle east, south asia has been an absolute nightmare every time we tried.
I think the future of outsourcing is going to be Russia: they can't speak English if their life depended on it but they're capable developers and paid ridiculously low. A few more years and people will start being a bit more fluent in English.
This is still assuming the USA and Europe will still have any relevance - maybe they should start learning Chinese.