A few points It ' s not just IBM most other large software suppliers like Infosys , accenture , Oracle Consulting etc have the same issues and opinions of them are equally negative It ' s not always strict incompetence sometimes it ' s just ' incompetent compared to what I expect a team of $ 3000 day consultants to be ' It got a lot worse once they started their offshore development teams , because they lower their chargeout rates for the offshore developers but the quality of work is correspondingly low usually At that point , people start thinking I understand paying huge rates for the skilled consultants , but why are we even paying $ 1000 day for these other guys if they ' re no better than the people we have already working for us ? At the end of the day , only a large company can handle a project that starts with OK we ' ll need 200 developers , 50 solution analysts and 75 manual testers However , these projects are not as common as you ' d think , and often it would be better to do it with a smaller company that has a record of e . g . not fucking up every time .