Most companies that I've worked for have had them, usually for specific purposes (billing system related) but they've also had them as more general cases, for l

Most companies that I've worked for have had them, usually for specific purposes (billing system related) but they've also had them as more general cases, for less than full time work usually (the people also contracted out to multiple companies). I don't know how common this is though since it's only a few companies and the people involved are all semi-related (Perl programming community).