[zmmmmm]

> you employ consultants and commercial providers to do this sort of work based on the fact they have skills you don’t

The irony is, it's nearly exactly backwards.

I have literally never seen effective use of consultants and outsourced work like this except in one situation: where you DO have the internal skills. Pretty much the only way to get any value is when you have highly knowledgeable and skilled people with strong engineering background managing the process.

Of course, convincing highly skilled engineers that it's a valuable use of their skills and time to simply manage a bunch of outsourced consultants when they could be directly managing a team somewhere else is a challenge in itself.

[lrem]

You are obviously right with needing local knowledge first. But I've seen two types of well-used consulting:

1. A small team needs to integrate with an external data source. They figure out it's better to keep own engineers focused on the business logic and bring external folk for the (hopefully) one-off task of figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the thing.

2. A large company needs to push the edges. They hire someone with a PhD in the general area, who then points at the exact professors needed on board to get the edges pushed.

[hackerfromthefu]

Regarding number 1, then expertise to support the thing is lost when the project is handed over.

[rstuart4133]

I suspect that's why the department of works, well, works. If they order a bridge, they almost invariably end up with a nice looking bridge that carries cars, doesn't fall down, and generally meets expectations. Ditto for a building, a road, an airport ... Its not just the department of works either, when their private counterparts order a rail line spanning 1000km to carry millions of tons of coal, they generally end up with a working rail system that does the job.

But order when IT naive organisation orders new IT system from a third party and you usually get a cluster fuck. And the tribal claims here it's because "gobermant bad" notwithstanding, it's universally true, meaning it happens just as often to private organisations as it does government ones.

It does make you scratch your head and wonder why IT is different.

Regardless of whether it's a bridge or a IT system, there will be a consultant's marketing team spinning a very attractive vision of smoothly delivered sunshine and unicorns to someone who needs sunshine and unicorns to get a lift up the org chart. The only hope an organisation has against that is someone the leadership trusts, someone who can say "That beautiful and convincing power point presentation is like someone promising to delivery nuclear powered cars - they either have no idea what it would take, or are outright lying. If you fall for it you won't get a promotion, they will get you fired". And the people who count believe them. (We had a high profile politician in Australia who was sold a vision of nuclear powered cars - https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=216653896514005.)

My favoured theory at the moment is IT is too new for software engineers to earned that level of trust. An engineer's career lasts 40 or 50 years. 40 or 50 years ago, Uni's were churning out civil engineers, mining engineers, every conceivable sort of engineer except - software engineers. And worse, right now, we need a _lot_ of them. Not every org wants to build a road, or a bridge, but it really is true software is eating the world, so every org's beyond a certain size wins really does need a custom IT system to support their magic operational sauce. As a consequence, we are seeing IT salaries going through the roof.

It's a great time to be a software engineer, not a great time to be needing one.