My gut reaction was to wonder if it will help at all. Will this foreign shop have skilled perl programmers available? How much will the language barrier slow things down? I wonder if it would be better to hire half as many contractors locally and be more confident in what we're getting from them. He suggested I research these things, specifically what's the going rate locally.
So I have two separate-but-related questions loaded into this meditation:
1. Does anyone know what the going rate is for contract work in the U.S.? Can a few people share what their own rate is? Ideally the person would be at least an intermediate perl programmer, and would work on-site in north-central NJ. The work is on a large web app, and is roughly 80% perl, 20% html & javascript. The contract would likely be budgeted to last a year or two.
2. Does anyone have experience outsourcing parts of a large Perl project overseas? I can't even begin to picture how that would work without requiring a lot of extra hands-on management -- which would mean that our existing developers spend much less of their own time developing. I wonder if the whole process might even be an overall drain on our department. But I have no experience in this area, and my boss has had some success with other teams doing it (albeit on a completely different and much younger project in a more "common" language).
I'm still not sure where I stand on #2. My boss has assured me that this would be in addition to whatever budget we can get for hiring more full-time developers, but I'm still not sure that having a few extra possibly-very-needy developers would be a worthwhile addition to our efforts. (I should also probably mention the fact that our app is over 10 years old, and has quite a few messy, undocumented, tangled bits of code and design. So the learning curve is steep, and there are not too many projects that are completely neat and self-contained.)
... (Skimming a few recent months' posts on jobs.perl.org, I see that the majority of posts don't include salary info. The ones that do range from $11 up to $60 per hour, and I don't know how realistic it is to look at unfilled, 3-month-old job posts as my only real example numbers.)