I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and configured.

I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and billed the client.

To be fair we did use clearcase for source control, but the outsourced teams were equally awful. There was a genuine concern that a lot of the team members out there were people's friends/family/neighbors because they never ever spoke in meetings (the lead would answer on their behalf if they were asked a question), and either we never saw any code from them or what we did was delivered slowly and was usually awful verbatim copy-paste work or simply just plain did not work.