It's up to you to not accept that excuse. Except, the company endpoint is a low status programmer. Imagine how quickly the average programmer would get laughe

It's up to you to not accept that excuse. Except, the company endpoint is a low status programmer. Imagine how quickly the average programmer would get laughed out of the room if they went to their manager and asked for $100,000 to pay an external contractor to implement a feature they need. Oh, also the feature will be open source and other companies will be able to use it after it's written too. The world doesn't operate on that level yet outside of maybe seven companies in the world.