While I don't really have too much of a horse in this race, and I don't think it's indicative of all outsourcing teams, I remember one gem from an internship I was working during college. We were given a code base developed by a 'guru' from eastern European country, I want to say Ukrainian. The product was an add-on for Outlook, and at one point I was given the problem of 'The app is slow with more then 10 contacts, almost unusable, speed it up.' After a bit of hunting around I found the problem was where the add-on was searching through the contacts lists trying to find a subset.
They'd managed to create a search algorithm with a big O of something around n cubed. I set about rewriting it to get it down to N all while wondering why on earth Outlooks API didn't support this relatively basic feature. It was at this point that I discovered that the API actually did support it, however the programmer had written a wrapper around the API hiding the method in question, then re-implemented it in the train wreck of code I was removing. That was the last time I ever worried about competition from cheap outsourced labor.