It’s not that the cost of engineers is unsustainable, it’s that aging companies tend to want to take power and decisions away from engineers towards management and accomplish this with outsourcing.
No in-house expertise means no management responsibility for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly competent engineers, like my wife.
Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue? This is the present and inevitable future.
Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster.
It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.
Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in the world has found a better solution to this.
As a matter of fact I've carved out a niche in these matters over the years. Essentially reverse engineering systems and building out functionality instead of the original creators of the software.
EDIT: The ERP company never made it not possible to interface through their DB in their contracts or by encrypting their functionality in the DB.
The amount of value I bring to my company is greater than 100 fold of my salary.
However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".
That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they are in a better bargaining position and so they can capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create instead of less than 1%.
