Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

I worked at a place that hired off shore (European) consultants for a part of our product and my colleagues would constantly complain about the quality of the consultants work and skillset.

I didn't complain[0]

Eventually corporate switched out the current body shop with equally bad off shore one from a different European country, but this time around they'd invite them to our HQ before hand for a week to to have lunch and spend time with before being sent back home to work remotely with us.

This time around no in my team said anything bad about the new group. These consultants weren't better than the previous ones at all, and ended up doing more damage eventually. Hell, some of the mistakes they did, the previous ones would do as well

Granted you could attribute it to "what's the point", but I suspect largely because of what you mentioned, face to face made them mellow... or from my PoV, weaker.

1: The reason I didn't complain is because they weren't any worse than my in house colleagues anyway and I found the irony funny and I was on my way out anyway.

No point in stepping into the fire unless I can control it.

As an example: At the previous company I worked, the CTO and another engineer really liked bouldering. They'd often go out after work to the local climbing gym. Eventually, two other engineers joined that group and went climbing too. Mysteriously, all three climbing engineers got promoted and none of the non-climbing engineers did. Eventually the CTO left for greener pastures and the "new" two engineers (by now team lead and VP) stopped climbing the week after.

But, sometimes there's stupidity at a different level. Just because someone is making an effort at prioritization doesn't mean they are doing a good job of prioritization.

It's hard to tell from the outside (where you lack the relevant knowledge), so you're kind of forced into giving them the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes that internal tools bug which they never get around to fixing is eating up 5 minutes of every employee's time every day for 2 years, and it adds up to a lot of wasted time, and they should have prioritized it but they didn't. Maybe because they didn't appreciate what the cost was, or maybe because they had some bias toward certain kinds of tasks, or maybe some other reason.

But it does actually work. When there are high-value things to do, then that is the opportunity cost of doing low-value things instead. ie, by doing the low-value thing you incur opportunity cost equal to high-value thing.

If we implement Feature Y, we can make $$$. If we fix Bug X, we can make $. So the opportunity cost of Bug X is $$$, the benefit of Bug X is only $, so we're not going to fix it right now.