Punkie

A lot of outsourcers do this. Here’s my experience with a few companies.

• The “team” you meet are competent, English speaking fronts. They are the demo models of the people who will work on your projects.
• After the contract is signed, these people are swapped out with randos of varying competence.
• In some cases, some of these randos are further hidden behind aliases: people with names that are actually more than one person sharing logins and passwords.
• They will string you along, trying to charge maximum hours worked without regards to product or services delivered.
• Most of these companies have a “bucket of crabs” mentality: the managers are horrible, the staff incompetent, and once the gain some skill, they leave for better companies. They backstab one another, hijack projects to fuck over coworkers, and lie and cover their tracks. Some of this is cultural, like a caste system, while some are just racist.

At one time, these people were pretty good, but they realized they had skills and left for other countries for better pay and better working conditions. The bids got more and more competitive, cutting costs until they were literally filled with low-skilled labor who can’t be promoted or leave for economic or competence reasons.