The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.
Refusal to do obvious time saving tasks when instructed to would probably put you on the “does not meet” list next review cycle.
Purposeful inefficiency is harder to sniff out because it’s not a manager-ic relationship. There’s often 2-3 hops inserted into the middle with the work going into a pool for the offshore team lead to manage. The offshore team lead is also consulting company so they have no efficiency incentives either.
they left the company because they could get a "better pay" anywhere else.
For offshore outsourcing company, their only business model is: amount they receive per resource - A. salary per resource - B. fix cost at company level. i.e. office rent, office maintenance, etc.
And Project manager's OKR are mostly to increase margin. Project manager have only control over A. hence they will always try to hire junior resource. So good resource often have to waste time in spoon feeding to rest of the team and they will leave the company as soon as they got better offer/company.
My company also outsourced onshore to another Indian company to modernize an area of our business (same area as rhe above example). It's a mess. They're behind schedule by years. They promised they had an ML system to handle this type of business case, but it's not working. They're also telling people to only record 40 hours on their time sheet even if they're working 50-60 hours. They've had so many people leave that they're throwing money at the remaining expert people to stay.