Cattle, not Pets.

In all my time in IT, I've never seen outsourcing bring any benefits other than perceived cost. The biggest problem is having a stake in the company. In general a FTE that isn't being underpaid is going to have some morale and is going to do more than the bare minimum for the company. Loyalty is something often mocked, but when I worked at some small startups, it went a long way. FTEs tend to look out for the company workflows and needs more, while the outsourced people will do as little as possible as per the contract. Anything more than that gets the middle finger, while FTEs may take time to ensure something is done right... as they have an interest in keeping things going. I've seen this with outsourced IT. When they close tickets without even responding, it guarantees something is broken, and eventually the damage done by that will be far greater than the perceived cost savings. It also means the good people see the handwriting on the wall and bail. The good people are the ones who, even in a recession like this, have the pick of the litter for jobs. At best, they are replaced by at most competent people, but people who don't really have a stake in the company or workflows. The relatively few insourcing ventures I've seen have always been financial successes. Once, I was given a PM role to hire and lead a team in a collaboration work with another company where both companies would write a code module they both needed together and co-own it, because there wasn't anything out there which could do what they needed. I picked up a bunch of CS grads (even though I was told that there was zero talent in Austin, and I had to go to India to find anyone who knew anything by my boss), did the project with the good ol' waterfall model with steps along the way, got everything done, tested, etc. The result was a sizable bonus because a critical piece of the company's secret sauce was now created, easily maintained, and done for orders of magnitude less than what offshoring it to some dev place would cost. The code was written in a low level language, which required zero dependencies (and the executable was statically linked) which was icing on the cake. To boot, some routines were even done in hand-tuned assembly, if built in amd64. Of course, I made the dumb mistake of leaving that company because I was offered a major pay hike somewhere else. Another insourcing venture was me taking the reigns of a large Mac organization from a MSP. I had several people, changed out the MDM, added machines into ABM, and the amount of money saved by doing that ourselves was tremendous, even when licensing an EDR and pushing that out. It does take time and planning, but once all the management tools are in place, it is nice having things on a single pane of glass. Of course, nothing was perfect, as I had do some custom scripting for some applications and an install sequence, but it was a lot better than a MSP that was completely unresponsive.