Probably why we were usually needed to do things that the internal engineering groups could not ......
Most of the time corporate would give us projects and tell us point blank that either the engineering group that had the project was too difficult to work with and was not making progress, or they would just give us the project from the start citing the same problems with their internal people.
The internal groups were never told the true reason that they lost the work and were ultimately given something else of lesser difficulty to work on ....
When we hired people we focused the interview questions on pertinent areas and we always had senior people whose job was to fill in knowledge gaps that junior (and even senior) engineers lacked.
Hiring good people and building great scientific and technical teams is an art that few people or companies master ....
