I've successfully done it. However, it took a lot of both care and luck. I met a guy from Ukraine on the FreeBSD mailing lists, and he and his brother led me to lots of success. I didn't start talking about him working for me until I had chatted with him for almost six months, though, and knew his morals and his work ethics. We did have one bailout by another we tried to hire, but in addition to the two brothers we had success with three others. We were paying $500 - 1500 per mo for full time effort, and $250 - 500 for HTML/JavaScript coders, in 2000 - 2005. YMMV now, rates are climbing everywhere.

You'll actually find that there are more Perl coders over there, though that's changing. Remember that they don't have Gates donations (aka Doze boxes) in their universities. It's also true that while there's wide variation,

That said, this was new, clean code, not fixup of crapcode.

Tell your boss that MHO is that he should pay you to create architectural and functional requirements and do a clean sheet rewrite with you overseeing, if you're up for it. Then, it doesn't matter where the coders are.

And yes, I was in the office at 4am and they stayed up half their night with me.

BTW, what is in North Central NJ? I grew up in Madison and Brookside along Rt. 24.