I don't think what you're saying is racist. I used to work for a company that owned an IT company in India with over 1200 people there. I spent half my day on the phone and/or email with staff from India and had to fly out there at least 3 or 4 times a year to supervise.
I've also had VA's in the Philippines and lived in Thailand for several years where I often employed staff on a contract basis.
Here are some general lessons I learned along the way.
And for those who thought the OP was being racist, allow me to just say that this isn't a generalization over an entire country, race, or ethnicity. It's simply differences in cultures, how we see things, and sometimes how frustrating two cultures coming into contact with each other can be.
Nearly all Asians (which India and Pakistan technically are a part of) have this thing about "face." Many misunderstandings arise from your Asian staff not wanting to lose face by admitting they don't understand or that they can't do the job.
You're never going to change that. But you can adapt your communication style to accomodate.
Generally, I don't outsource anything to Asia that requires the developer/designer/etc to exercise much thought. Not to imply that they're stupid or can't think but I've found that most Asian workers prefer work that is clearly defined.
For instance, I was the product manager for a software product and one of our competitors came out with a new feature I wanted to duplicate in our product. I sent an email to my development team in India (most of the team had been working on the product for 5 years) and asked them to duplicate the feature. They insisted they needed a detailed set of requirements but I assured them that it would take me longer to write the reqs than it would take them to develop it if they would just go download the software and see what I was talking about.
The next week when I called for our regular status updates I asked about the feature and was told they were confused (actually, that admission only came after 1/2 hour of various questions). So, I verbally described the feature and was assured by the 12 developers on the call that they understood now. Again, I asked that they download the software and check out what I was talking about.
Our next meeting I asked about the feature again and again I was told that they didn't really understand it (again, without really ever admitting they didn't understand). I asked if anyone had downloaded the competitor software and looked at the feature. Nobody had. So I instructed them to all download the software and look at the feature. I made it clear that I was expecting everyone to have done this for our next meeting.
On our next phone call a week later, nobody had downloaded the software.
Finally, I did a screencast of the software and sent them the video. The feature was complete in less than 24 hours after I sent the video.
The point is, while they were highly competent engineers, something was obviously not working with the communications. While there are some adjustments I've made to my own communication style over the years to help me better get messages across in cross-cultural situations, I've learned that it's just easier not to outsource certain types of work to Asia. It is far less time consuming, and possibly cheaper, to pay someone in the US, UK, LatAm, etc 2x - 3x more for the work and give them more freedom and less direction in accomplishing the task. Again, it's not that Indians or Pakistanis or Thais or Filipinos can't do it. It's just not as common because the ability to work that way is not as common to their culture.
Because, on other types of projects, where we had 3 or 4 months to write specifications, work with our US and European design teams, etc, the engineers in India performed fantastically If the work was highly organized, clearly defined, and there was no room for confusion, they executed amazingly. But the second that something required making a judgement call, everything went sideways.
