[tomp]

The entire business model of "outsourced" developers / shops is to overbill people - "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).

Even if the engineers themselves are cooperative, their managers / business owners will resist close cooperation and enforce work at arm's length (e.g. 1x weekly calls).

Ask me how I know. I once spent £300k (fortunately not my money) on an outsourced team of developers, and they delivered nothing at the end. Most of the time it was simply about aligning the work! We (me and my partner, we together had some idea of what we actually wanted) tried repeatedly to make sync-s more frequent, to better align the efforts, but their managers kept resisting. It's the "consulting" business model!

For remote jobs, the incentives are reversed. You're literally a full-time employee, there's no management layers to impede communication, and (unless you're lazy or a fraud) you probably want to work on interesting problems and not be bored!

[Tade0]

> "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).

Largest such scam[0] I've heard of was "we have 11 senior engineers working on this project" (actually three, two of whom were actually junior-to-mid-level).

[0] Let's call a spade a spade.

[tintor]

"we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects)

Does it matter how many engineers work on supplier's side?

Supplier is tasked to deliver the project. It is up to them to figure out how many people would they need, and to manage them.

[svachalek]

Depends how billing works, but it's pretty rare to see terms that say we'll deliver exactly what you asked for, on a fixed price and fixed timeline, and take all the liability for failure. To some degree or another you are paying for time and effort, which are easy to misrepresent.

[jpalawaga]

if your supplier promises you an iPhone 17 Pro, and then delivers you a Pixel 4a because 'thats all you need', you will be understandably miffed.