Nasa's Jerry Madden “A Project Manager's Lessons Learned” [pdf]

> Contractors tend to size up their government counterparts, and staff their part of the project accordingly. If they think yours are clunkers, they will take their poorer people to put on your project.

This describes staffing of software projects to the letter. I have called this approach to staffing the 2 duds and a rockstar. When a project or product looks like trash under the hood or external help is required management is quick to offload their worst people on to it. Once that happens the pain points are obvious (to everybody) and so a token rockstar developer (expert plus soft skills) will be sacrificed at a ratio of one rockstar to every 2 to 5 duds to keep the effort from imploding.