Analogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer, who hires some college kids that actually do the job.
> who hires some college kids that actually do the job
Sounds about right, except that
> hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death
the job was actually not done, but faked.
The last developer from India that my company hired (2009 or so) left us with some sub par script, which had some 500+ lines of code for some data validation that was actually never executed.
We then switched to people from the Eastern Block, and we never looked back.
Why would I, Middleman Hitmeister, tell the marksman I'd hired about taking a cut and passing the job on?
"They hired me for $500K to get this done. I'll pay you $250K to get this done." Now I risk the guy killing me to take the full $500K for the contract.
Last employer before I started wanted 3 iOS apps built to copy the in house android apps, they hired ATT for some reason, who outsourced it to an Indian firm, who outsourced it to three random teams of people they found. $400,000 later, they got 3 crappy apps that took twice as long as estimated to be finished. I wound up rewriting most of the most important one. All 3 apps seemed to have been derived from a common ancestor and then disconnected and given to three teams; the code mutated separately from the common ancestor, so fixing things was like hunting down Ebola variants.
I've seen UK company -> US company -> German company -> Ukrainian company
Although I worked for the UK company I did actually get to speak to one of the chaps from the Ukraine and they seemed a good team - though they had no idea who we were or why they were making the changes they were implementing. The Ukrainian team eventually disappeared though and this being 2014 we did wonder....
During the outsourcing craze, I came up with a business idea, to create a fake job shop in India, but actually have the work done by programmers in the US.
