Rise of the Corporate Skeleton Crew?

Big Stick asks: "Recently I have noticed a trend in several prominent companies in my area of laying off entire technology departments. Just this week in my own company--a division of a well known, mid-sized corporation--the software engineering department was let go en masse, rather than just a reduction in head count. The rationale for the move being that it would be easier to evaluate the potential cost of developing a new product if groups of contractors were hired, instead of the numbers getting lost in the 'free' work of the full time developers. The overall impression this leaves is that many major companies are re-prioritizing the need to innovate new technologies for the presentation of their business, relying on skeleton crews of DBAs/SAs to maintain rather than enhance. The main question this raises is, are we heading towards an era where full time software development is more likely to be housed in technology specific firms? Something along the lines of the construction industry where projects are bid on, constructed, and the involvement of the creators with the finished product is minimal?" If others of you are noticing this trend in the industry, please share your thoughts. Do you think this is a move forward or backwards?

Comments

Not good.

[Kris_J]

My guess is that they decided to outsource all the development to an off-shore company because it looked like it would be cheaper on paper. Only time will tell if that's really the case.

Time has told. Rough figures: Contractors do half as good a job, taking twice the amount of time (though they only get called in for half as much stuff). Overall, IT contractors cost about 25% more up front and the level of computer support falls so low that it adversly affects the rest of the staff to the point where the real costs of external consultants is anywhere from 50% to 100% on an in-house IT department.

Not all consultants are the spawn of evil, but the ability to walk away from something that goes wrong and have plenty of other companies still interested in your services does result in the failure of many a high profile project. In a big economy, a small IT consulting firm just isn't accountable. Mind you, failure often isn't strickly their fault -- if there are no IT people inside a company then there's no one who can really talk to and understand IT consultants. Frequently the two parties will think they've agreed to totally different things.

Unfortunately, the first full-time IT person to walk into a company after an outsourcing balls-up isn't much better off than the consultants, with no-one in the company able to help them define their job and understand the installed systems, so the turnover for the first few permanent staff is also a bit high, leading to problems that look very similar to those caused by outsourcing.

But I mean, what do you do when no-one in upper management understands how the company's IT infrastructure works? And how do we ever get to a point where upper managment at least has a few people who do understand IT when they're mostly so damn horrible to anyone that knows how a computer works?