Seems like the issue is that any company will prefer to avoid a technical problem for $10k rather than pay $100k to do it in-house. I personally do a lot of int

Seems like the issue is that any company will prefer to avoid a technical problem for $10k rather than pay $100k to do it in-house. I personally do a lot of interesting work purely because the stuff I'm doing cannot possibly be done externally (since I'm a scientist and systems engineer). So I guess the trick then is to work someplace where what you want to do is exactly the business problem they're solving. Anything that isn't directly their offering is likely to be farmed out, and I think that will only accelerate. I don't know the right software analogy, but I wouldn't advise a client to research new ways to manufacture PCBs if all they actually need is to have working PCBs. But if their business model revolved around a new PCB manufacturing method, it would make perfect sense for them to hire me to help them develop that new method. Assuming it's similar with software, if you want to research making databases run faster don't work for a database consumer, work for a database provider.