[LionRoar]

I work at a small company as the only software engineer (indeed sofware is not the core business here). My annual salary is around 40K euro. 3 years ago we started a huge project and hired extra manpower (4 persons x 3 month). 1 person of that team is still with us today. We are on the moment busy starting up another big project whereby we hire 5 persons extra for a couple of months.

Without these extra software engineers we could have never reached our deadline.

However: an external consultant costs us 10K a month. Thus 3 x 3 x 10 = 90K. And for the new project; 5 x 3 x 10 = 150K. Nothing special but my point is the 1 person that still hangs around from the first project. That was (almost exactly) 3 years ago. So 3 x 12 x 10 = 360K euro. (total hiring amount > 600K). My salary in these 3 years would be 120K. I think it would have been cheaper to have had an extra employee. In fact you could have 3 until this moment.

So, based on that; hire consultants to have extra manpower in your project. However, hire them 'too long' and it was smarter to have an extra employee.