[ZoFreX]

To expand further on those points with a personal anecdote... I worked on a "big website" for a very big government department. I was still in university at the time, had about a year's experience with the platform, and was earning close to callcenter wages.

The government only contracts to companies on a particular whitelist, which we weren't. They paid a company something in the region of £300,000 for the website.

That company then outsourced 100% of the work to the tiny (single digits employee count) company I was at.

They paid us £40,000.

My share of that works out at about £2,000.

The fact something cost half a million dollars in no way implies any kind of quality, or that the people working on the software will know what they're doing. (Really: another horror story involved a website that only needed to work in IE6... and had been built and tested purely in Firefox)