[southern_cross]

My experience dealing with such folks 10 or 15 years ago was that even if the person presented to you as the "provider" was actually the person doing the work (and not just a frontman for others), you were lucky to be able to hold onto them for a year. I see that others here are saying just six months, though.

Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India.

We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though.

The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though.

Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!