Mid-sized marketing firm outsources IT firing the single employee who had been there for 4 years, he gets a job paying $20k more: 'The first week after I left, their main server crashed. The outsourced company took 6 hours to respond, another 8 to fix it'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Aug 8, 2025 12:00 PM EDT

I've never understood outsourcing roles that have some sort of hands-on requirement. Certainly, there are numerous tasks within an organization that can be handled from a remote location. However, there are some things you just don't want handled by someone who is remote, especially very, very far away, where there is no way they could reach the site in any sort of urgent manner. If your business were an industrial operation, you wouldn't want to have a remote plumber or electrician. And almost certainly, it would be disastrous to have a remote firefighter. Can you imagine? 

So, when you're operating a business that deals primarily in information, you know, like a marketing firm, and you rely on technology in order to do your work. It's bewildering to me that you would consider outsourcing your Information Technology (IT) department. These guys are quite literally your firefighters for any sort of technological crisis you might have, from helping set up new computers, phones, and user accounts to managing the networks and entire systems that the company operates with. Besides, when it comes to end-user support, the whole point is being able to get hands-on with it to be able to use experience to eliminate issues caused by user error.

As is typical with this sort of thing, you often won't even know why they're there or what you're paying them for until you really need them. And this doubt and wondering has led many an upper management to turn the watchful, sleepless eye of cost-cutting onto their IT departments. Cutting into that pesky bottom line by getting rid of staff who "aren't doing anything anyway" feels pretty good when you're in upper management. But the next time your laptop won't turn on, the conference room screen isn't working before an important call, or there's an issue with the company's systems, you'll find yourself wondering just who the heck is supposed to be sorting all of this out for you.

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  • "'We don't need you, IT is easy to outsource.' Okay, good luck with that."

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  • This happened about 6 months ago and I'm still laughing about it. I was the only in-house IT guy at a mid-sized marketing firm. Did everything, network maintenance, software installs, user support, security updates, the whole nine yards. Been there for 4 years, never had any real complaints.
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  • Then new management comes in with their brilliant cost-cutting ideas. They decided my $55k salary was "too expensive" and they could just outsource IT support for way cheaper. Called me into a meeting and the new director literally said "IT isn't rocket science, we can get someone remote to handle this stuff for half the price." Got my two weeks notice that Friday. They were so confident about their plan they didn't even ask me to document anything or do a proper handover. Just "clean out your d
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  • Within the first week after I left, their main server crashed. The outsourced company took 6 hours to respond and another 8 to fix it because they had no idea how our custom setup worked. Entire office down for most of a day. Then their phone system went down. Then someone got a ransomware email that took out half the computers because nobody knew how to properly configure the security settings I'd set up.
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  • Two months later I'm working at a competitor making 20k more, and guess who calls me? My old boss. Not to apologize or ask me to come back, nope. To ask if I'd consult for them "just until they get things stabilized." I told them my consulting rate was $150/hour with a 4-hour minimum. Never heard back.
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  • Ran into one of my old coworkers last week. Apparently they've been through three different IT companies and are now paying more per month than my entire annual salary used to be. Plus they lost two major clients because of system downtime. But hey, at least they saved money, right?
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  • data center technician holding up his phone in one hand with his laptop in the other
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    The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • A_Paradigm Shift This is where one door closes another opens. Happy for you bud.
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  • Theduckisback Upper management at companies are taking the marshmallow test every single day and failing it over and over again. "I saved us $25,000! Bonus time!" 2 months later "Ok, so my decision to save us money ended up costing us 10 times what I saved, but that just means we weren't mean enough to our employees. Let me make more cost-effective* decisions now!"
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  • Blankasbiscuits I had a similar issue regarding my employer and his land management business. He insisted that having a plumbing company on a contract was better, as they would have all the tools and resources to fix anything. The catch was, it always took them 6hrs minimum to get anything looked at or even an attempt to fix (not to mention a $200 fee per crewman that they needed). At our last meeting, I suggested "why don't we just hire 2 journeymen and 1 apprentice plumber? That way they're al
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  • Thankfully, one of the site managers pulled me aside and told me "If you can get quotes and invoice everything out, while making it cheaper; I'll put in a good word and see what I can do" And now we have 1 journeyman and 1 apprentice (a concession for cost, of course) and it's been a month and already they are already seeing a cost decrease and a down-time reduction.
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  • KaleRevolutionary795 And you think they learned from this? They probably still think they are right, but the world sabotage their plans.
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  • dachloe Did some consulting for a very similar company. They ran the same "outsourcing" idea past me. I said it's a bad idea, and it will cost you way more in the long run. AND, I told them they actually needed to expand their IT team. This shocked them. I said they needed one more person as backup, and to help accelerate bigger projects they had on the horizon.
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  • They kinda went with my plan. They hired a part-time college kid. It worked out pretty well during the summer. But, they had to hire another part-time person in the fall. Things went very smoothly and there were no major outages, as and countless mini disasters were averted. The big difference here is the top management was very old fashioned and was all about the quality and stability. They were willing to pay more to get more. They valued a smooth running operation more than cost savings.
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  • MASSochists One of the reasons I got out of IT. You can be a hero to an end user, but not to management. A good IT department means things are running smoothy. So smoothly people start to wonder "what do they actually do here?". One of the first to get fired, one of the last to get raises. Kind of like a goalie. They can never win a game, but they can always lose it. Just no spectators.
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  • Top-Sherbert-5923 35+ Years in IT. I've been outsourced, contacted, laid off and out of business more times than I care, IT is an expense, not a revenue. Although due to faster computers, network and internet we make everyone more productive. But then you get what you pay for. You go bargain basement, you get cheap a support....
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  • TuecerPrime I love these stories. They always consider IT a cost center and do everything they can to zero it out until it blows up in their face.
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