Honestly it's not a bad idea. Erlang is not a language that is easy for an experienced engineer to pick up and quickly create maintainable code.

Whether you hire an outside consultant or not doesn’t matter. You have to pay the cost one way or another, either by your employees spending time learning the language + experimenting + making mistakes, or by going through some training and hopefully making less mistakes (not guaranteed).

Not saying this applies to every company, but I've worked at two different companies that have done something similar:

* Healthcare startup that basically outsourced its entire infra/security team from a consulting company. The consultants rewrote everything and took over engineering leadership, basically acting as gatekeepers for anything SRE-related.

* Worked at an older DNS company that hired a bunch of consultants to help engineers migrate their web framework from Play to Spring. Said engineers used Play because it was shiny but didn't have the Scala expertise to keep maintaining it, so they moved to pure Java.

I had the same reaction. However, I work for a small team with driven developers. It is expected from our engineers to learn “best practices” on their own time when we introduce new technologies. We are also compensated extremely well according to these expectations. If you have a team of engineers with a different mindset, you will need consultants.