I would like to know how much efficiency was gained as a result of getting rid of the bureaucracy. That alone must have been worth quite a bit.

BETA Problem > What the crap. I _AM_ logged in. Why is it saying that?

I'm saying this because I've had issues with Pride in the past. Management won't ever want to hear that the decision that they made to move forward on a project was a bad one. Further, they won't want to hear start over -- unless its an issue of pivot or go bankrupt. I'm surprised that, with your experience and the value that you bring to the table -- you didn't outline the pro's and cons and then let the management draw conclusions from that. Not only that, but if I took multiple months to come to this conclusion then it will take management a bit longer to come around. Normally, its pride and impatience that bites me in the @$$. I hope you don't struggle with the same.

When I think about how the dev shops that have some part of their product that's outsourced, it pretty much stinks. It stinks to have to maintain it after its been created by the contractor/contracting-agency. It stinks to have to deal with contractors who aren't invested in the longevity of the product. That said, remote-only work for SQA -- I'm assuming the OP meant "software quality assurance" -- or hardware (again, assuming quality assurance here) is going to be hard to find by its very nature. Those roles have everything to do with a product that the potential employer probably doesn't want to stink. The potential employer probably wants the quality folks, at the very least, to be on site and in-house so that they can make doubly sure that their idea of quality is aligned with the business' idea of quality with regard to this product.

This doesn't matter until the manufacturing costs are either less than or equal to the current cost to manufacture flash devices. Its a long road from scientific achievement to higher capacity flash storage for the masses.

Isn't this a utility, though? How's that going to go out of business? People will always need power.

They trying to decrease costs and increase revenue, plain and simple. Some of the first few ways to do this is to try and coerce some to give up their severance or pension to leave early by leaking this news of this outsourcing effort. I doubt that they'll actually do this, though. The lack of security and liability by having a foreign company maintain a domestic utility provider's IT systems seems staggering. This would, IMO, fall into the purview of federal regulators or even defense in the sense that federal regulators and higher-ups in the military would be concerned for the safety of the nation if this actually happened.