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.