"careless" employees

Recently a friend said to me, "My remote engineer contractors aren't committed enough.  They say they'll get a feature finished by the end of the week, but they don't finish in time!  How can I get them to be more committed?"

Another friend said, "My engineers in China are not invested.  They're not detail-oriented.  Our error rate on the site is insanely high.  The engineers just do a half-assed job.  I wish I could hire engineers who care more."

A third person said, "My engineer is too young and isn't careful.  He doesn't check his work.  He lets serious bugs get onto the site."

In all 3 cases, after hearing about how these engineers are careless, I had this exchange:

Me: "Do you do code reviews?"

Friend: "No."  (except first friend who does them retroactively after the code is already checked in)

Me: "Do you send out technical designs for review, before you start coding?"

Friend: "No."

Me: "Do you have unittests to catch the regressions?"

Friend: "No, we barely have time to develop the features.  We don't have time to write automated tests."

Me: "Do you have manual QA?"

Friend: "No.  I try to test the site when I have time."

Me: "Do you have a standup every morning, so that you know about schedule delays after at most one day?"

Friend: "No.  We're such a small team.  It seems overkill."

Why, why, why would people expect to get great results if they flout all the best-practices that have developed over the past 20 years?  And then blame the poor engineer?

Let's say I ask an architect to build a house.  But because his hourly rate is expensive, he's not allowed to make a blueprint first, or build a small-scale replica, or to spend time holding discussions with subcontractors.  Every minute needs to be spent doing hands-on work on the house.  The house ends up being completed late due to re-work, and after being finished, it has all sorts of problems.  Do I blame the architect?