FAANG and other companies outsource lots of (sometimes critical) stuff to obscure service providers that just kind of employ bodies to do generic work. There are American companies that employ people in the US, that may have half or more their employees in India or other places. Very non-household names, even compared to a company like Infosys.
Those companies that are paying people in India $5-10K equivalent (I assume) aren't paying US employees 6 figures. The wage disparity is an implicit threat that their US employees cannot expect a raise ever, and should be happy not to be laid off. Most of the US is akin to "flyover country" even near the coasts and over $50K is a good living for people who will never consider moving to a megacity.
I think people occasionally ask in places like HN, "if corporations will go to the other side of the world to hire people cheaply, then why don't they go to low wage areas of the US" and the answer is duh, they do. Someone can go to no particular place in Appalachia and hire Americans who have no better options.
There are two obvious reasons (but I've never seen someone state out loud) why FAANGs or other prominent companies should outsource critical functions.
One is that super genius software engineers who make six figures often do not do an adequate job on anything they dislike or feel is beneath them. "Prima donna syndrome".
The other is that when super genius employees making the big bucks screw up in some extremely high-profile way, it's very embarrassing, and it's better to be able to point the finger at an external service provider, since at least they are (ostensibly) specialists and how could anybody be expected to know their inner workings.
Plenty of things are critical, but not core. I'd expect something outsourced to be defined as non-core, and also that is a very flexible category.
For instance, Google had egg on their face in a court case a while ago, because they accidentally produced documents that tended to undermine their case vs Oracle.
They didn't account for gmail autosaved drafts, didn't group them properly with the final email that was sent, and so they didn't claim lawyer-client privilege.
Unfortunately, as they say, "you can't unring a bell" and once Oracle and the court saw them, they didn't agree that they were in fact privileged.
Subsequently they outsourced legal IT to a greater extent, and I infer a connection.
I don't know from an insider's perspective what their reasoning was, but it seems to me that outsourcing forces people to be more explicit about information sharing and provides a buffer.
Like, the engineers must know about gmail, and the in-house legal staff must know about producing documents, and they assume too much common knowledge because they're under the same roof.
Whereas if you send documents elsewhere, then you know they know nothing about gmail, and they know they know nothing, etc. And if you send similar documents, grouping them together is a standard generic process that will be done on everything.
If this all seems rather far afield from aerospace engineering, well, it so happens that one of the companies (I haven't worked for them) that people outsource legal IT to is one of the largest and best known aerospace/defence companies (but not Boeing).
When I found that out, I was like "Ah...their core competency is...paperwork! Of course..."
Even if they can afford it, it still defies rational behavior to pay 6 figures for an american programmer when they're "fungible" with indian programmers making $9/hr. I'm sure a FAANG programmer "extracts more value" from a $20 cup of coffee than it costs. That doesn't mean it's not highly unusual/irrational behavior, considering that other coffee shops charge a few bucks for a cup.
We are valuable commodities. Something being expensive doesn't mean that it is valued on an individual basis. An ounce of gold is expensive, but extremely fungible.
