Ask HN: Is this policy common for large off shored IT consultancies
This has a bit of lead up but I wanted to give context before posing my question.
I am a mid-level developer at this company and a few months ago we got a pair of offshored Accenture devs join our team to help meet some deadlines (I had no say in the matter).
One is decent. The other not as good, but still gets stuff done, albeit slowly. This latter one is the issue here.
The 'good' dev went on holiday for a day. The remaining not-as-good dev proceeded to ping me a few questions about her ticket because her code that she wrote was not working. Super basic questions that seemed to imply she did not know how how basic functions in the language worked in general, nor any clue how to read her code error. I was a bit perplexed as they were given to us as experienced hires, but I gave her some direction on it and let her be.
Later the dev pings me to 'connect' but being vague and doesn't want to put her issue in writing so I get on a call with her to go over their code with screenshare. Their articulations skill were not great and I was struggling to understand their issue so I figured it was best to view her branch myself.
I asked her to share her branch with me. She mentioned there was no branch yet as it was all local code. No problem she can just create one. She raised and merged PR's in the past so there should no issue here right? Nope. she struggled with this, and I basically had to give her a half an hour tutorial on how Git and Github worked so she could commit her code to a branch that I could view.
By the end of this it was late, and I had another evening appointment so I told her I'd look at it in the morning and we could pair together.
This is when she proceeded to beg me to not mention in tomorrow's standup that I will be pairing with her (I had finished all my tickets for this sprint and was looking for work to pick up). She said if I did, the other 'good' dev will question her on why is she asking me for help as she's not meant to. I asked her what she meant by that and whether it was a company policy on their end or something related. She said yes, she was to approach the other 'good' dev for all problems. I found this to be strange and said it's not great to keep such a policy hidden as I can't very well say I am doing nothing in the following days standup because I am forbidden to share that I am pairing with you. I conveyed to her that it's in everyone's best interest to share any ways of working matters with each other so we can adequately support each other.
At this point she basically has a mini panic attack when she realised I might convey this information to my manager, and saying to not worry and that she will resolve alone and there is no need for pairing with her and begged me to keep quiet about this policy. At this point I cut the meeting short as I had to go for my evening appointment.
It slowly dawned on me that the reason the slower dev was able to successfully close tickets despite not knowing the foundations was likely because the 'good' dev was doing her work for her and while they were away on holiday this obviously was not happening hence me being pinged.
This is wild for me. The cynic in me says that most likely Accenture wanted to double bill us so gave us one competent dev and a bad one, but basically forbade the bad one from speaking to us to not be found out and then charged us two heads for the value of one.
Is this policy something you've come across before for offshored consultancies? I'd appreciate your insight into whether something potentially illegal is going on here or just a dev trying to cover up their incompetency by making up an excuse for why I shouldn't share I will be pairing with her at stand up.