You always get the least qualified when borrowing personnel and this applies to outsourcing too!

Thought experiment:

You work in engineering and you need to borrow some hand work assemblers from the production department of you company.  Describe who they loan you?

Results:

Generally speaking they will give you the screw up.

Reason:

They have a job to do and its called PRODUCTION ……not ENGINEERING!  You can be sure they will give you the person they would be most likely to lay off in the next round. 

This principle applies to outsourcing also. The following is an exerpt for this arty: Outsourcing – too successful to waste on teams of less than 50 people 

We hire from all over the world, but we don’t get much talent from India. This week I went to a panel discussion about outsourcing and got a clear explanation why. The jobs that I work on are startup product builds with 4 to 10 team members. Those jobs are just too small to motivate an outsourcing company to assign good people. They save the best people for the biggest customers, which is exactly what I would do.

How bad is this problem? We qualify individual developers by hiring them for a week or two to work on real projects. When I pick individuals for this paid trial process, they succeed about 70% of the time. However, when I run trials with developers proposed by Indian companies, the trials succeed less than 15% of the the time. This happens even after I clearly explain my desire to find the best people, and my qualification process. If the trial does succeed, about 40% of the time the person who did the trial turns out not to be available. It’s “just kidding, we want you to work with a more junior person.” As a result, I quickly learned not to accept trials from Indian companies. The odds of finding someone good are too small to justify the effort.

It is the same effect.  The screw ups go to the lowest priority projects.