So true. In fact, it can be even worse managing an outsourcer style vendor, since the natural industry pressures lead to outsourcers being very incentivized to find the very minimum possible effort they can spend on a client project without losing the contract.

As a result, getting more effort out of an outsourcer may feel as annoying as getting your insurance company to approve your claim -- their entire company culture/process has evolved and/or been designed to prevent this.

By contrast, individual employees (remote or otherwise) might get lazy or burnt out or have personal problems or something, but few of them are actually Wally from Dilbert, using all their available effort to avoid having to make any effort