during my time working at a european oil major, word got out i had previously worked in tech and i somehow got loaded with the responsibility of being business analyst and SME for the development of a new pricing tool (in addition to my regular job, of course). obvs, the company, to save a few centimes (or so they thought), outsourced development to a 3rd party indian development team, who worked off a design document that i cooked up over the course of a couple of weeks. no cap, crystal clear design doc - as long as you bother to actually read it, which of course they didn't in spite of the fact that i spelled out exactly everything they needed to do in the design doc, and would meet up with them biweekly to go over features (i'm not calling them user stories, go cry on r/agile), troubleshoot and so on, they simply could not make it happen. just one example, i remember spending like a month explaining to them twice per week that they were using the wrong primary key for some table (it was fucking up data integrity during updates, blah blah blah), yet they could not figure it out. it only got fixed when i convinced them to let me do a code-along session with their "data engineer" to fix the issue. there were several cases like this per month. this dragged on for almost a year and somehow they managed to bleed us for $700,000 in development costs for an application that honestly would have taken a single qualified developer maybe a month of solo work to do. At that point, they were perhaps halfway done and I gave my honest assessment to the company that they would probably try to bleed us for another $700,000, at which point the company pulled the plug this is one story, but frankly i had many at this company. they also outsourced accounting to an indian team as well. absolute fucking nightmare. i would spend hours trying to explain to indians how Excel works, why you can't just make up numbers and you actually need to track unexplained expenses, discrepancies, etc (that's basically literally their whole job) because they could indicate a billing issue or internal data problem. and so on. i'm honestly unconvinced at this point that outsourcing actually saves money. sure, indians are only $300 per month or whatever, but you end up paying 50 of them to do something a single decent worker could do, and yet they still fuck it up