Most companies are not _just_ tech companies and don't have business analysts, consulting analysts, solutions consultants, software engineers and DBA's on staff.

Many, many, many companies are very happy with the consulting firms they hire.

Of course, those are the consulting firms that aren't publicly traded and in the news all the time (for all the wrong reasons).

My experience with outsourcing over 20+ years (Russia, Romania, India, South America) is that you just move money around when you do it.

It takes more planning, more specification, more coordination, more QA. The quality is almost always worse, and remediation takes forever. So your BA, QA and PM time goes way up and absorbs any cost savings.

YMMV.

I think a lot of companies have ineffective ways to measure productivity, poor management (e.g., people who were IC's then promoted to management but have no management training or experience), incentives aren't necessarily aligned between orgs and staff, so people end up with a perverse "more headcount" means I'm better than Sandy over there. Leadership and vision have been rare in my professional life (though the corporate-owned media celebrates mediocrity in leadership all the time with puff pieces).

Once you get to a certain size company, this means a lot of bloat. Heck, I've seen small(ish) companies that had as many managers and administrators as ICs.

But You're not wrong, I'm just pointing out how an org that has 4k people can lay off a few hundred with modest impact of the financials (though extensive impact on morale).

Oh? You have some sort of insider knowledge here?

I'm also in process of migrating away from OpenAI - I don't like the management, the product has quirks I can't stand, and now the latest PR disaster.