[stevewatson301]

That's just based on the ability to convince the management types though, and I'm sure you've heard of the phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM."

For an executive, it's easier to justify outsourcing to a large consulting firm simply because of the security afforded by the choice and the ease of justification; rather than any technical abilities they may or may not possess, and certainly it does not imply its correctness.

The anecdotes you hear are from a engineering perspective, which is where the consulting firm has to walk the walk, exposing their true abilities. It is incorrect to dismiss that as being "salty" or "pretentious", and tint them with an angle of "discrimination". The lack of processes and guardrails in these consulting companies is an objective fact.

[basha94]

Steve, how dumb do you think management is? Why would a company spend >=$1B+ in OpEx and CapEx just because somebody convinced them instead of seeing any technical value whatsoever?

[stevewatson301]

Did you ever have an interaction with your manager where they could not understand the technical details of a project and insisted on only a high-level overview?

People understand the world through dimensionality reduction and lossy compression of information in domains that they are not involved on a daily basis. This causes an inherent issue when you stack these phenomena across multiple organizational levels; this is how you end up with Intel's or Ballmer-era Microsoft's management failures, to use some non-WITCH examples, or the issues that we're talking about in this article.

[hn_go_brrrrr]

Management is human, just like everyone else. They absolutely make their share of truly stupid decisions. It's just they have more power, so their stupid decisions cost way more and affect more people.