The Home Depot

stable job, stable company, so it is not likely to go under in the next number of years.

IT is poorly staffed. Many of the people were hired by individuals with little or no IT background and therefore were unable to accurately judge a person's IT skills.

There is heavy use of offshore contractors, but it seems like the actual contract agreements are very unsophisticated. Either that, or we get the least well-rated contractors because most people cannot judge the contractors' real abilities. It seems like the contracts do not do a good job of specifying good benchmarks by which to judge the results delivered.

Right now, the ideal person THD needs is someone who can fully develop applications but code them in pseudocode. This pseudocode can then be handed to the majority of contractors to transcribe into some other language.

Basically, most of the contractors require a level of supervision that forces the supervisor to do everything but write the actual code. This is not to say there aren't some good contractors, but they are rare.

The same can be said of the skills of many of the IT staff, except skilled associates are less rare than skilled contract developers.

There are too many different things I could say, but they're all specific solutions rather than advice.

I would suggest hiring someone who can provide better tools to ensure that any staff hired or contracted could be more accurately evaluated. That in itself would go a long way toward solving many problems.