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I have seen the same problems on in-sourced projects. You still need capable engineers. May be managers who outsource their projects tend to be more clueless. I give you that.

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Software is very hard to do well, and you're right that many in-sourced projects fail or suffer extensive problems. But when you outsource, you keep all the normal, natural problems of software development and add many more enormous burdens and difficulties on top of that. In my experience, the failure rate of outsourced projects is much higher than that of in-sourced projects. We can't gloss over the differences by just saying that they both experience failures.

I agree that capable engineers are very important, but I have seen more than one project with high-quality engineers fail. Of course, you very rarely get high-quality engineers with outsourcing.

I completely agree with you. I was just trying to stress the importance of having capable engineers. It seems that people forget about it when they outsource. Furthermore, you actually need better engineers if you outsource.

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