[magicalhippo]

If you have competent people on both sides who care, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

The problem seems, at least from a distance, to be that bosses treat it as a fire-and-forget solution.

We haven't had any software done by oursiders yet, but we have hired consultants to help us on specifics, like changing our infra and help move local servers to the cloud. They've been very effective and helped us a lot.

We had talks though so we found someone who we could trust had the knowledge, and we were knowledgeable enough ourselves that we could determine that. We then followed up closely.

[tayo42]

I think your first 2 sentances are pretty common issues though.

[stackskipton]

Most companies that hiring a ton of contractors are doing it for business/financial reporting reasons. Contractors don't show up as employees so investors don't see employee count rise so metric of "Revenue/Employee" ratio does not get dragged down and contractors can be cut immediately with no further on expenses. Laid off employees take about quarter to be truly shed from the books between severance, vacation payouts and unemployment insurance.