If you want to survive here, read below… Learn from the expert that has already gone through what IBM is putting you guys through as it gradually replaces each of you domestic counterparts with cheaper offshore workers.
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Don't write any code comments, or if you do, don't explain how things work
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Create silos of local work groups and work face to face... No email on how/what you've done. Shut your mouth, do not type – Silence…
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If overseas teams ask you how to do things, give a broad brush overview, no details – the goal is to be as confusing as possible, make them feel like they are stupid and do not understand you. Alternatively, you can make them feel that you are stupid, that’s fine too – they will go away.
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Write more complicated code that is more difficult to understand, provided it does not affect the underlying performance/reliability.
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Don't write complete design documents. IF you write design documents, write enough to get management to think it's done, but not enough for engineers offshore to do anything useful with it.
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Occasionally, take a vacation day off on short notice, and let things just "blow up" after you hand off your work to offshore teams. When you come back and things are completely not working, send lots of email about what a terrible job people have done. You need to hit them where it hurts, you need to demonstrate how detrimental to the company their work is…
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Always blame problems on offshore teams, no matter how small - ALWAYS.
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Always blame the reason why you problems can't be fixed earlier is because there is a 5, 10, 15 or whatever hour time-zone difference between headquarters and those remote offices.
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Hold meetings at times that is convenient for you but in the middle of the night for those offshore teams – this is a must. Never cave in and offer times that might be convenient to them – this is a US based business and they should meet when it works for US resources.
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Make sure your meetings you conduct locally are as efficient as possible and make your local U.S. totally in sync and ahead of the work schedule before you even meet with the offshore team. That way, it makes them look incompetent.
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The best meetings are the ones held at 5:00pm PST on Friday, since that will be Saturday overseas, so the ones that most won't show up.A nd the ones that do show up, end up having to take time off their personal schedule to do it... Make sure this is a reoccurring weekly meeting... Make sure people know if they did not show up for meetings, that’s unacceptable – we are expected to work on weekends.
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At the last minute, reschedule those meetings for the next week (but continue to meet locally and carry on your business – this is important).
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Make sure you send out a meeting notes to senior management, indicating who attended and more importantly, who didn't attend... This is important and partially covered in #11
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When someone screws up overseas, always make sure you take the initiative to fix the problem, and make sure you send out 5+ emails telling management how you fixed the problem, describing in extreme detail how things got so screwed up and how you fixed it. And most importantly, if you're going down, you might as well create as much havoc internally inside the company as possible. Nothing is worse more than a company has so much internal conflict that efficiency and productivity comes to a halt.. It's 10x worse than any sort of external competition.... And that's the predicament corporations and will put the company in when it starts trying to just save on "cost" by offshoring....