US founders hiring offshore — what's been your actual experience?

I'm on the other side of this — I run a small software agency in Europe and we work with a lot of US-based clients and founders. So I see both sides of the offshore hiring thing pretty often.

The ones who have good experiences tend to come in with some kind of spec, care about overlap hours, and treat contractors like people. The ones who get burned usually hired the cheapest option with no vetting, handed over vague requirements, and then disappeared until a deadline.

I know that sounds simple but honestly it really is that simple most of the time. The "offshore doesn't work" crowd usually means "I did it once with no process and it went badly."

That said — I'm curious what you've run into. Are you hiring this way now? Have you tried and stopped? What actually tripped you up?

Happy to share more from my side if it's useful — what works, what regions are worth looking at, how to structure things, whatever. AMA basically.