Oh please. When the server is on fire at 3am, PagerDuty wakes California employees with the same success rate. Surely you can put in your employment agreement that the reason you are paying American wages to someone in a much cheaper location is because they can be woken up at any time. The finance industry has operated this way for decades.
I don't think waking someone up every night at 3am for a question/idea is 'seamless' or productive at all. Delayed email for when they wake up is what we generally deal with, but it definitely creates friction when working across large time zones.
The possibility for misunderstanding is much greater too. You and your colleague might speak perfect English, but you may still have trouble conveying to them exactly what the problem is with the vibrating mirror assembly is that's causing it to wobble without just showing them. That's difficult to do over email, and a conversation of that nature can take weeks, while if you're in the same office it might take hours.
I can see how the situation you are describing works in theory, but the example you are giving is weak. Every device I own has a video camera; I am sure yours do too.
Unless your devices can turn fine/coarse adjustment knobs and handle Oscilliscope probes remotely, I might think it's a perfectly fine example. You would still need to wake up at 3am to have the teleconference, and you would need to continually be aiming your laptop at the device in question.
Additionally you would need to be able to adjust the focal range of your webcam, and it would need to be adjustable enough to pick out fine features. You might also need it to be a high-speed camera.
I don't know a lot of people whose devices have those capabilities. In that case, even a 3am videoconference is nowhere near as good as being in the same room. I've had to work with people under those conditions, and it's very difficult to convey anything other than a course of action.
Maybe 33-50% of the nonverbal communication involved in technical communication is you pointing something out to your colleague, and while it's certainly possible to do that over email using pictures, they will never have as complete a picture as you. Some things you need to see with your own eyes to understand.
It is a fine example, and it is true that my consumer devices don't have the capabilities required. However, now that we are diving into the details of your example, you are presenting the solution necessary.
If the programmer on the other side of the world is so much better than what you can find locally, surely it would be worth the investment for your company to buy high speed cameras, or remote probes, or whatever else, to make this sort of teleconferencing possible.
Laparoscopic surgeons manipulate human flesh by looking at a screen! The first remote robotic surgery happened 13 years ago!(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery#The_Lindbergh_Op...) I understand that medical equipment is incredibly expensive, but you are not saving lives, so your equipment should be cheaper in an appropriate manner. It seems to me that when scaled out, that solution would be cheaper, and would promote better technological progress in the long run, than the upheaval required to import all the world's greatest programmers into the US.
