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.
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.
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:
"Why need call? I will read the code."
Despite all the cool Matrix aesthetic, I dread to think of a programming language in Chinese.
[1] https://github.com/DennisMitchell/jellylanguage/wiki/Tutoria...
And I am not completely joking.
