Didn't he pay too much if 3 extra hitmen accepted a reduced offer? Only the last one was below market rates it seems.

Or not enough since the job was not done

No, he paid so much that everyone thought they'd make money and not do the killing themselves. Had he offered say, $30k, the killer would not have outsourced it.

…and the job might have been done (might because the first person in the chain may never have intended to do the killing himself. The intermediates may just be brokers needed to move from the circles of rich Chinese to the circles of killers)

Of course, offering too much also runs the risk of “Chinese Whispers” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers) the initial message “Foo will pay $X to kill bar” could end up as “bar will pay $x to kill Foo”.

4. Don’t murder people.

Hey now. We're here to discuss implementation, not pick apart product requirements!

But as he pointed out, we can implement it in next sprint as an improvement. Just put it on backlog.

you know damn well that it has been laying around in the icebox for forever and its never getting done! Im definitely bringing this up in the retro

This project will never get to the post mortem.

I don't see how that's a moral of this story. These people were caught and punished because of their unwillingness to murder.

Morals for stories are usually conclusions drawn from a sample size of one. Aka the anecdote.

For this story though... 4 out of 5 people subcontracted to another hitman. First anecdotal story I've seen that could be statistically significant.

”below-par execution”

Heh.

In this case, there was no execution at all

Moral of the story: Pay a decent price and then pay someone else to kill the killer. In most countries you have an idea how much it takes to kill a person, with prices varying depending on the target and degree of law enforcement. If word is out that there's a contract on X...you're screwed since you might be #1 on the list of said person's enemies

Oh yeah that's going to work out really well if the killers know each other and have some mutual respect...

Alternatively to 2. If you pay someone so much money that the can contract the work out to someone else and still make profit they might.

Alternative 2 to 2; If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.