The stuff did get built in the company, usually half by contractors and half by the internal staff developers under guidance form the aforementioned managers. I

The stuff did get built in the company, usually half by contractors and half by the internal staff developers under guidance form the aforementioned managers. It was just build very slowly and it was held together by sticky tape and dreams. One manager spent 50% of his time keeping an old system he wrote as a developer years earlier from completely falling over because no one else could understand it, byzantine doesn't begin to describe it. He worked many, many, many hours overtime doing this in addition to his managerly duties but, of course, because this is Japan, he won an award for hardest worker of the year and a trip to Hawaii... which he couldn't take because otherwise the system would fall over.