[lgleason]

When I was consulting as a contract cto for a startup they were pushing to hire a us consultancy that was outsourcing to China. So I had the meeting with the rep from the consultancy. Being a technical person that codes I wanted to be able to work directly with the developers. The sales weasel from this firm told me with a straight face that we could not do that for our own protection. Then said weasel proceeded to describe a waterfall dev process and told me that they were a agile shop.

I strongly recommended to this firm not to hire them and had a lot of long frustrating conversations about why. The kicker was that the snake oil salesman was trying to get the sale by offering a moneyback guarantee. The price he was too low and too good to be true. In the end I fired this customer.

At the end of the day you need to know enough to know what is happening. If you are in a startup you need to be able to communicate your vision to your developers. And if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.