Oh goodness it's like you're reading my mind.
My job before that was for J&J. I was a contractor there. They always did contract to hire so starting as a contractor was normal. What was not normal was I started just as they entered a budget cutting period, so they stopped converting contractors to employees and started looking for ways to save money on contractors....
Anyway I was there nearly 4 years. As a contractor, yes. I was in the ecommerce/web hosting team. Tylenol? St Josephs aspirin? Anything Neutrogena? (well after J&J bought them) That was us, we had all those websites for all those J&J products you know and love.
Group was considered important enough we had 24/7 onsite responsibility. First 2 years there I had juniority so I worked nights. One of the things we were responsible for was a BtoB communication/supply chain management thing. Walmart used it to order from us. When it was down, it was BIG money. It sometimes went down at night.
I mentioned budget cutting. There was a big money saving initiative. One was they decided to do that was offshoring. Yep, outsourcing to India. They were going to replace all front line help desk functions and all off hours (US) support with bodies attached to telephones in India. Because for the cost of one body in the US you could get 4 bodies in India.
Note I said bodies, not brains. My last 6 months there was spent training my replacements. They needed a lot of training. There were other issues. Like, the people they hired knew nothing. I mean NOTHING. Once you trained them so they werent useless, they'd job hop to some place that paid better. Our training program was like a treadmill. Or a vocational program, or something.
So anyway, eventually our (US people) contracts were up and they let us go. I heard some horror stories from friends there who were employees (so not let go). Quality of service went WAY down. They had (expensive!) outages, unhappy customers, it was a shit show. Turns out my team did indeed replace US workers for Indian at a 4 to 1 ratio, and still quality of service went down. (Yes the US workers were way more than 4x as productive as Indian.)
About 8 months after they let me go, I got a call from them asking if I wanted my old job back. I just laughed. (Yeah I was already with EDS)