Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivia…
The ERP that my company uses is proprietary and they charge large sums of money to make custom changes. I am an in house developer that has gotten to know the database backing the ERP and have extrapolated functionality based on stored procedures and table schemas. The work I do would cost my company much more than my salary and I build interfaces that connect to marketplaces or marketplace API aggregators such as Ch…
That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they are in a better bargaining position and so they can capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create instead of less than 1%.