You hit the nail on the head with this, couldn't have said it better myself with my experience on the management side of this exactly matching your experience.
I didn't say how much should be easy. I have a software business that pays me approximately $3-400/hour invested. That's pretty much the definition of easy!
You may need to hire one crackerjack Sr. SE in the U.S. for USD200k+, but then hire ten offshore guys as USD20k to follow that person's instruction. Cost analysis: OPTION 1: Offshore with U.S.-based lead SE: Code: $200,000: 1 @ 200k: 1 US-based Sr. Software Engineer (tech lead) $90,000: 6 @ 15k: Six offshore mid-level programmers ------------ $290,000 Total OPTION 2: All U.S. based onshore talent: Code: $200,000: 1 @ 200k: 1 US-based Sr. Software Engineer (tech lead) $540,000: 6 @ 90k: 6 US-based mid-level programmers ----------- $740,000 Total Cost savings: $450,000 Option 1 is almost 1/3rd the cost, with comparable results. No-brainer.
I think you should sell this proposal to Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google. You can return more to shareholders that way.
If you are on a budget then: Option 3: I senior guy @ 200K and 2 mid onshore guys at 80K. (Total 360K). This Option will do just as good job (probably much better) than that option 1. Even better would be Option 4: 2 senior guys on 200K each. Ofshore guys look cheap but are a false economy.
The old classic book from the 70s, the Mythical man month had a good analogy: You can do software engineering as a Surgical team, or you can organize it as Hog butchering. Ofshoring to a large team == Hog Butchering most of the time.
Well then all of us who work in this industry must have no brain! You make a huge assumption here, that a good programmer is an equally good manager and hand holder. That alone is very rare. Even if you do find that unicorn in a leprechaun forest, you're paying them to spend almost none of their time programming and most of it hand holding. And again I'm not sure how to get this across but it's not a linear thing...good programmer is 2X better than a crappy offshore one. It's logarithmic, good developers are 10-20X better and a crappy offshore dev can actually destroy value so a good developer is mathematically infinitely better.
Well looks like the salary gap between the Asian nations and US for software engineering is partly due to barriers to trade via the restricted quota for H1B visas. Not saying that the coders from outside of USA would necessarily code better but it does widen the possibility of obtaining someone like you say whose brain is "wired in a certain way to be a good developer" and would help even out the salary gap of software engineers between the US and the other countries which is probably not what the US software engineers want. My degree is in finance but I do do some light coding to the point that large part of my trading is automated. You are right as long as you have certain mindset you would be able to code and a specific degree in CS is not a requirement. Basically the skill that's required is essentially problem-solving skill, being able to looking at a problem, see where is the fundamental cause of the problem and then design the solution to resolve it. Both of my parents are engineers so I dunno if that helps me in being able to code even though I don't get paid for doing it. LOL
A NANNY (I assume is a legal US resident/citizen) makes $75K??!!! 83% of the salary of a SE who's just incurred a six-figure student loan after spending FOUR years in a CS program??!! That's ridiculous!! What's the point of working if you are going to just give 83% of your salary to somebody who looks after your kids? That's almost like working for free!!! No wonder the Californians hate Trump so much for wanting to build that wall forbidding illegal aliens from entering USA. LOL On the other hand those software companies REALLY should allow their workers to work from home. That way they will be able to get more value out of their super-expensive house/apartment and at the same time save on nanny cost.