No decent engineer would stay there because there was nothing to build and management would always just contract out everything. Management, which was promoted internally from bad engineers, couldn't shop a good SaaS product or consulting firm and instead were consistently convinced into buying shitty Oracle products.
In-house products were badly done, which led to contracting out engineering, which led to no engineers, which led to getting screwed in the contracting.
Fixing that company would probably involve firing the whole tech department.
we spent more time trying to make an external tool
do something that could have been built in house in
the same or less time.
There's also a version of the "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" fallacy/truism at work, right? If management picks $WELL_KNOWN_PRODUCT_XYZ and things go sideways... well, they don't look foolish. But if they rely on... some random in-house engineer and things don't work out, they look like fools.
(Even though, in both cases, it actually just comes down to the same in-house engineers. Because the in-house engineers still need to do the integration work)