actually, I feel you may have made the case for outsourcing.<p>In your example - it was a single task. Working with the assumption that domain expertise can be acquired on the job, the costs of doing subsequent jobs will be lower for the outsourced engineer.<p>The more times the same task needs to be performed by the engineer, the cheaper outsourcing becomes. Your example just accounted for the startup cost, which can be assumed to be a one-off*<p>*Is it that way in practice? at least in some projects, it is.