I work for a 10,000+ person public company that just outsourced critical business functions via a 5 year contract that doesn't have any meaningfully enforceable description of the work to be done.

If you're trying to talk about hiring for full time employment as opposed to contract work... what happens there is as long as people are able to get through whatever idiosyncratic hazing process was involved in hiring, they're going to be at the company for at least a year. It's perceived as hard / risky to fire people, even if they can't program their way out of a wet paper bag.

This stuff happens all the time, it's not that different from evaluation and use of third party code. "This project has 500 stars on github, it must be good." "This guy used to work for Google, he must be good." Now you're stuck.