4 ms·

I'm a consultant and my last 2 clients have been going through changing outsourced service providers because "The last guys were hopeless/too expensive/just lik

I'm a consultant and my last 2 clients have been going through changing outsourced service providers because "The last guys were hopeless/too expensive/just liked arguing about contracts" or whatever. I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability. They do everything they can to give it to someone else and then pay companies like my employer $2k a day for me to sit here and write unit tests, ansible playbooks and no end of just bog standard dev jobs. In my case I'm meant to be mostly doing architecture rather than dev, but what good is the architecture when the actual systems and applications are not looked after properly?

madeofpalk 9y ago
To be fair, more and more companies these days are brining these capabilities in house as they realise that Digital needs to be a core-competency. But besides, the upside is that you can just go work for these consultancies anyway. Look at CommBank - its agencies, contracts and subcontractors all the way down, but those agencies are still hiring those people locally here. I have like three friends who are all working for Qantas via three different agencies.
- Khaine 9y ago
  CommBank is probably a bad example, as they do all sorts of crazy things. In some areas, Infrastructure is outsourced to HP, Application management is shared between internal staff and consultancies. In others, its all in-house, and in others its a mix of independent contractors and internal staff. The Federal Government is a mixed bag. The larger agencies are required to comply with the Information Security Manual, which is a prescriptive set of controls from ASD. They mostly outsource infrastructure to a contractor and then either have in-source development or outsource it depending on the amount of development performed. For example, if they need to set up a new system as a once off, its probably outsourced. If its something that will continually be added to they will hire developers. Government departments struggle to get skilled staff who will work for government wages and pass a security clearance. They also lack a lot of knowledge around IT at upper levels. Additionally, when they budget for systems they are terrible about asking for additional CAPEX to reduce on-going OPEX. They usually undercut their budget, half implement a system and then rely on manual processes. The efficiency dividend and on-going cuts then eat into their ability to perform those manual processes.
bigger_cheese 9y ago
>"I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability." From what I've seen at least at my org it was a "Not our core business" type of problem. A lot of orgs got hit hard by the GFC. It's hard to explain if you didn't live through it but it was a bad time, really bad. For about 5 years between around 2008-2013 huge chunks of private sector was moribund. I am an engineer (the non software type). For a while mining jobs in WA / rural QLD were only jobs going. Construction, manufacturing etc on East Coast all just died almost over night (and still has not fully rebounded). Basically anything not considered "core" got contracted out/sold off. IT, HR, Legal, Accounting etc. Huge swathes of redundancies. Jobs that have never come back. I think all these problems are coming back to roost for various companies now which are cause of some of the symptoms alluded to in original article (though I can't really comment of public sector not familiar with it pretty sure many public service departments went through similar outsourcing though). The issue is once these costs are contracted out and "off the books" takes a pretty brave CEO to bring it all back in house again.
zmmmmm 9y ago
> I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability They simply don't have the culture from the top down to manage those kind of people. When your entire middle management has no software experience they are too afraid to hire software developers. It takes guts and a lot of maturity to hire people with skills you don't understand.

madeofpalk 9y ago

To be fair, more and more companies these days are brining these capabilities in house as they realise that Digital needs to be a core-competency. But besides, the upside is that you can just go work for these consultancies anyway. Look at CommBank - its agencies, contracts and subcontractors all the way down, but those agencies are still hiring those people locally here. I have like three friends who are all working for Qantas via three different agencies.

Khaine 9y ago
CommBank is probably a bad example, as they do all sorts of crazy things. In some areas, Infrastructure is outsourced to HP, Application management is shared between internal staff and consultancies. In others, its all in-house, and in others its a mix of independent contractors and internal staff. The Federal Government is a mixed bag. The larger agencies are required to comply with the Information Security Manual, which is a prescriptive set of controls from ASD. They mostly outsource infrastructure to a contractor and then either have in-source development or outsource it depending on the amount of development performed. For example, if they need to set up a new system as a once off, its probably outsourced. If its something that will continually be added to they will hire developers. Government departments struggle to get skilled staff who will work for government wages and pass a security clearance. They also lack a lot of knowledge around IT at upper levels. Additionally, when they budget for systems they are terrible about asking for additional CAPEX to reduce on-going OPEX. They usually undercut their budget, half implement a system and then rely on manual processes. The efficiency dividend and on-going cuts then eat into their ability to perform those manual processes.

bigger_cheese 9y ago

>"I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability." From what I've seen at least at my org it was a "Not our core business" type of problem. A lot of orgs got hit hard by the GFC. It's hard to explain if you didn't live through it but it was a bad time, really bad. For about 5 years between around 2008-2013 huge chunks of private sector was moribund. I am an engineer (the non software type). For a while mining jobs in WA / rural QLD were only jobs going. Construction, manufacturing etc on East Coast all just died almost over night (and still has not fully rebounded). Basically anything not considered "core" got contracted out/sold off. IT, HR, Legal, Accounting etc. Huge swathes of redundancies. Jobs that have never come back. I think all these problems are coming back to roost for various companies now which are cause of some of the symptoms alluded to in original article (though I can't really comment of public sector not familiar with it pretty sure many public service departments went through similar outsourcing though). The issue is once these costs are contracted out and "off the books" takes a pretty brave CEO to bring it all back in house again.

zmmmmm 9y ago

> I can't for the life of me understand why large companies don't want their own in-house dev/infra capability They simply don't have the culture from the top down to manage those kind of people. When your entire middle management has no software experience they are too afraid to hire software developers. It takes guts and a lot of maturity to hire people with skills you don't understand.