[janpeuker]

Outsourcing usually gives you exactly what you pay for, arguably more transparently than other ways. It’s just that transparency (i.e. the price for quality) is sometimes not passed on from management / procurement taking that decision down to the team eventually having to work in a distributed fashion.

I think that’s also where the assumptions of the original post are off - the difference between DeepSeek and a frontier model is not usually what low quality outsourcing can cover. So you probably end up paying a highly qualified outsourced engineer who may not be significantly cheaper (most outsourcing is not just due to cost but capacity and capability).