>"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

>"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.