I used to work in state government. There was no "gradually switch them out" - we got the D-team as soon as the sale closed and the project started.

Many federal contracts require naming key personnel during the bidding phase to try to minimize this. Resumes for the key personnel become part of the proposal.

Aha! That explains an odd case where my company was subcontracting with another company to work on their project that was ultimately state-funded. This was essentially a museum installation, VFX work for a projection thing, and they wanted the names of the people who were going to be involved.

This was very odd to us, since our names wouldn't mean a thing to anyone on the client's end, but we chalked it up to red tape. Your explanation finally makes sense of it.

I've worked state engineering jobs like this, where the RFQ is basically nothing but the combined resumes of the A-team. The contract says they do the work, but it still gets sent to juniors.

At most, it gets the A-team's PE stamps, so they're at least professionally liable for the quality of work, but first project coordination/ outline meeting & final review are all they usually do. Occasionally take a call from a VIP.

Which is probably going to be followed by a no-cost contract modification to switch out the name of personnel who couldn't possibly wait for a job as long as it takes the contract to get to approval/award. Just in my experience.

How does that work in practice? Say the personnel in question leave the company.

That would depend on the government to notice and take action. I imagine if one person left and the company put a suitable replacement in, it may not be noticed and wouldn't likely draw any lawsuit. But swapping in a "D team" as described would likely provoke a response.

You'd have to have a major screwup mid-project, and they'd either freeze the project and/or start executing liquidation/damages clauses as soon as they realize the scalp they want isn't there to be had.

And when the project freezes indefinitely, so do the payouts.

When I was doing contractor jobs, in one of the projects personnel rotation was met with a hefty penalty. So the PMs tried their best to keep us happy, which meant a lot of the guys took advantage to ask for a generous raise. This was BTW a pretty non significant and easy support operations support project, so I imagine this terms were standard for other projects.

In those cases the customer has to approve the replacement (within reason). Comes with a price premium though.

Oooookay. That explains... Some of the weirdness of applying for a Federal Government project. The number of wild gesticulations they asked me to do with my resume really turned me off from trying to take the job.

I asked why they were doing it, but no one gave me a straight answer. I mean, I get for them it was Tuesday, but when a major contractor starts asking you to brush right up against the line of equivocating, I can't justify moving forward without some serious explanations and levels of frankness I don't think many recruiters are comfortable with..

My first job out of college was a practically fly-by-night video game development house that had primarily D-team members except for a couple of contractors and me.

After my first successful project for them, their biggest client started demanding that I be assigned to their next big project (or one of the external contractors). We both ended up taking jobs elsewhere, and that client quit using the developer.

And the client? They were a full-on shovel-ware developer that barely cared about game quality. They just needed a game that would run reliably enough that Nintendo would approve it. So to be fired as a developer by that company was really embarrassing...

Here is one such "key personnel" clause: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/48/2052.215-70

It's the same with large state contract I've seen as well. They key personnel may actually be provided in the request for proposal even before the agency signs a contract.

That was my experience when I worked at Boeing in IT. As soon as the contract was signed we got the most mediocre people.

Occasionally we’d get someone good but as soon as the consulting company figured out that they were good, they’d get rotated off our project and replaced with someone mediocre. They also never gave us any warning when they were going to switch someone.

But how much does Boeing pays for the service?

Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best. So obviously, they don't exactly get the best.

The worst part is that all these D-tier, fresh out of school guys gain experience and some may even get good at their job. Unsurprisingly, these people start asking for raises and promotions, and the consulting companies tries to charge their customer more, I mean, we are talking quality now.

But the big company financial department doesn't like it, so they make a new call for cheap contracts, get a new round of incompetents, etc...

In the end, everyone loses. The consulting company makes little profit, sometimes even losses and the big company always get shit service, which usually costs them more than what they save. As for the employees, the work conditions are often terrible and they usually quit at the first occasion. But the financial department is happy, they have a lower number in the "expense" column.

I've worked for an organization that had a mixed hardware/software/services components. These were $50mm - $100mm+ contracts running for 5+ years, and the Service Component was just charged out at person years - flat fee, so - a project manager might go for $600k/year, an application engineer for $500k/year, a field-engineer for $300k/year and so on. Each project would then have so many person years at each stage of the project - project manager would be pretty flat at 1 project/manager/year, but in the initial years, it would be 3 application-engineers, 2 field engineers, etc...

Once the contract was won, we'd sub-contract to a local (to the region) contracting agency, who would in turn essentially do the equivalent of a craigslist search for a body, that we would interview to ensure that they could be taught, and then we'd take 30-60 days to teach them our product - depending on the initiative and experience of the candidate, the customer (who remember, was paying us $500k/year for an application engineer) - might get a recent-high school graduate that was making $30k/year and had never even heard of our technology a week prior.

> Because what I've seen happen is a large company uses its size to negotiate really the cheapest prices, and the only way the consulting company can make profit is by hiring the cheapest people, and even with that, the margins are thin at best.

I have trouble feeling sorry for the consulting company in that situation. If the budget your client offers is insufficient for the job, demand more or turn it down. Don't lie that you can do it and then bait-and-switch.

It’s been several years since I worked there but if I remember correctly it was a little more complicated because these were basically subcontracts under one larger contract. The company had a huge contract agreeing to purchase some volume of services from the consulting company. For each project a smaller contract would be created to define the terms of the project and the resources would be drawn from the parent contract’s pool of purchased resources.

This created a lot of internal pressure to use contract resources as much as possible.

Is that how we ended up with the MCAS debacle?

And were constantly wrestling with integration because neither side really understands or even cares about the other's domain.

Hiring contractors to work on your house tends to end up the same too. So much of what the early people say just magically disappears when the actual work gets done by a completely different set of people.

As an example, when we had our bathroom done, the guy they sent to finish things up couldn't even center and level the towel racks.

I saw this first hand while working for a high-end landscaping company. The first team sent out to a job site would be the A-Team and they would do about 50% of the work, whether they were done for the day or off to do another job. The next day (most jobs took 2 days ATL, some took more) another crew of less experienced workers would work the site until finished, then the owner would come inspect. The owner was on the "A-Team" and his work was amazing; I was on the "B-Team" and though I always put 110% into my work when I physically could, I constantly worked with slackers and corner-cutters who also came and went. It made sense the way it was explained to me, which was that the people working odd jobs who don't really care will get bummed out by the B-Team labour and pay, and if they don't they're added to the A-Team after a few months of good work and some more training.

I noticed that the contractors who sell projects tend to be good looking guys. The ones who finish it tend to be not so good looking.

Especially when the customers are female.

A different flavor of this (in home re-modeling, hardscape etc.), is that the people who come to do the estimate are different than the people who come do the job. They are typically younger and pretty much clueless as to how the work would have to be done. So you can't ask them any detailed questions. All they can do is run the spreadsheet on their laptop and show you pictures of other work their company has done. They were trained on how to make a sale, that's it.

Had to go with someone who I had a little trouble communicating with, but at least I could verify he knew what they were doing and understood my concerns about how the work got done.

absolutely; with house builders. Next time around, I'm inclined to manage the build myself.

Talk to someone you trust who did the same thing. Managing anything related to construction can ruin marriages, and lives, the whole ordeal could last for years.

I would do this as a “Sales Engineer”. Not interviews but as sales support to handle any technical questions and win over our client’s internal devs. We didn’t outsource, but it’s really just sales.

I actually think it’s essential in medium+ size companies. The authenticity of having a highly technical person in sales works wonders.

> Every company brings the A-team to win the bid for a contract. Later they'll gradually switch them out with the much cheaper juniors they hire for that particular project.

Generally, you need the A-team at the start because there's a lot of very critical work that needs doing. After a while, it's mostly maintenance, so it's silly to keep your top people there... you can still call them in when they're needed.

This is just resource efficiency.

And yet the client cost generally doesn't come down...

The cost is already estimated with junior-levels in mind. If you want the A-team to be present all the time, say it upfront and surely proposals will be changed.

Presumably you'd pay a lot more to always have the A-team.

Ha. I work for an engineering consultancy and I pointed out that we actually do the opposite: bid on a project using a senior engineer rate, then when the project starts, realize that all our senior engineers are booked and only the Principal engineers (who cost about 30% more) are available.

I honestly wonder how this place makes money some days!

Not _every_ company does this – the consultancy I work at does not. We never outsource to third parties without the customer being involved, we do not hire [juniors or anyone else] for specific projects.

I imagine you also send your best not worst engineers for a bid or demo. For the rest, as I said it's just far more extensive in IT than in other fields. There will be exceptions.

And being able to scale on demand is a big part of providing a service. Otherwise you can't absorb any unexpected spikes in demand from already existing projects, or have to pass on lucrative opportunities, or you pay to keep a buffer of people on payroll.

We send the team that would be working on the project, to the extent it's known at that time.

But yes, bigger consultancies absolutely do this.

This is only true for large companies that care about nothing but their shareholders and quarterly reports. There's another group of companies that not only care about delivering real value within the budget, but also have fun while doing it. I'm fortunately in a company part of that second group. The reaction we get from clients when we deliver more than they asked for, repeatedly, is priceless.

any company can do this, its just that the more people who feed themselves in the food chain, the more likely it is someone will start a race to the bottom of profit taking.

And it is OK. You do not want to hire who doesn't have an A team (so to speak) which cannot pull off the project if there is trouble.

As someone who was part of that A team used to sell things, I spent a year jumping between projects fixing the problems the D team caused. Maybe it would’ve been worth it if I got paid more but I doubt it. It was stressful, you never learned much, and ultimately I burned out.

> ultimately I burned out

Can I ask, does that mean you got so worn out so you couldn't work, had to stay at home / away-from-work for some time?

I wonder what happened afterwards. Seems you now work as an independent contractor now? (looking at your external profile, I hope you don't mind)

Honestly, I had quit and wanted to do a startup (not the best way to deal with burnout though). But we were also expecting my son so I took a pretty steady 9-5 job for 18 months.

But after working on the same problem set for that long I got interested again in solving tougher problems and went back out on the consulting scene.

But that job forever changed my views on work life balance so I am now very aggressive with balancing hours for people that report to me even if I don’t balance my own hours.

In theory all is fine. The problem is the A-team shows they have the skill, not the capacity. So in practice you'll never see that A-team again because that's not their job.

You'll see one or two of them again when the project crashes and burns, haha

The A team is the sales team, not the team that fixes the problems from outsourced work.

Technical Sales

Some of the most successful engineers I know, got there by migrating over to engineering sales. I'm almost convinced if you are a moderately skilled software engineer, are very good looking, very charismatic, and have maybe a spoonful of general business knowledge, you can pretty much name your salary. They'll stick you in a suit, fly you around with the bizdev guys, and you only have to do anything if the client brings their tech guys to talk. You'll occasionally do some coding: write a few demos, maybe integrate your company's software with some other company's workflow, but mostly smile and talk about architecture, frameworks, blah blah blah. Nice work if you can get it. I was too much of a cynic and critic to make it in such a role, and I have the looks of a toad, so I never bothered.

Pretty much describes one of my (former) neighbors. She was a programmer who discovered that she could make a ton more money doing sales instead. Then moved up from there into a Sales Management position and never looked back.

How does one get one of these jobs? :-) It sounds lovely. Listen to all kinds of different business ideas and build proofs of concept. Talk to other nerds and hear about their experiences. Travel and get points (this last one, not so much).

I meet all of those qualities, maybe I should take a look at this!

As long as the job can be delivered to a mutually-satisfactory state, then it shouldn't matter if it's done by an A/B/C or D team. A lot of times in software "consulting" firms, the "profit" margin diminishes or is negative the closer you approach the top levels of developer in terms of quality/seniority. So it's in their best interest to get the most out of less-senior developers, otherwise they simply don't turn a profit.

The clients though, they want to pay the consulting firm relatively the same price they would pay for a standalone developer employee, per hour. The entire industry is broken and a lot of it has to do with broken recruiting, the recruiting industry, the "consulting firms" (body-shops) that are just resellers, and onerous employment regulations that make firms prefer outsourcing to shady outfits instead of hiring in-house developers.

The problem is that during the sales process, the client is led to believe that the "mutually-satisfactory state" that they are paying for is a certain bar of quality and will be built by "the A team".

But then, after many months and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars are already spent, their bar for "mutually-satisfactory state" has been lowered to "I guess we will accept this pile of mediocre shit that the D-team built, because we already wasted months on this and we are desperate for something, and it would be too expensive and just waste more time to try and argue with the consulting firm to fix it".

I spent a long career as a consultant at one of the top "prestigious" firms. Consulting firms almost always prey on this hope that the clients won't complain too much, even though everyone knows the end product that is delivered isn't anywhere close to what was pitched during the sales phase.

"As long as the job can be delivered to a mutually-satisfactory state"

When has that ever happened?

I've personally been part of many, of varying size.