Bingo. That's sooo bad for engineering that a company does that, and probably bad generally as well. My company does this and its infuriating, like, you don't even know what's involved, why would you do this? My company also, for most of its lifetime, has relied on contracting out software development.

My current project in fact started out life offshore but the work was so slow-going and awful iterative results that they then rev'd up a real software team to complete it. Initially they wanted us to complete the project without scraping the offshore code base, which was in baaaaad shape. It took another consultant, hired for a different reason, rather than listening to their in-house leads (of which I was not one, I was a junior at the time), that they needed to scrap that code.