The advertised cost of a single internal IT hire is the salary line. The real cost includes superannuation, leave loading, training, equipment, software licences and recruitment overhead — and by the time all of that is accounted for, a $70,000 base salary commonly becomes $95,000 to $115,000 in true annual cost. That is a substantial commitment for coverage that, structurally, still has real gaps.
One person cannot provide after-hours coverage without simply being on call permanently, cannot take leave without a plan for who covers the gap, and cannot realistically hold deep, current expertise across networking, cloud, security and telecom simultaneously — those are separate specialisms in any organisation large enough to need all of them.
The less visible cost shows up at departure. When a sole IT generalist leaves, the business doesn't just lose a salary line — it loses the undocumented knowledge of every system, password and configuration decision that person accumulated and never wrote down, because writing documentation is reliably the first thing sacrificed when someone is stretched thin. The recruitment and onboarding cycle then restarts from zero, often during the exact period when nobody internal can cover the gap they've left.
There's also a quieter operational cost: a generalist under sustained pressure to cover both strategic work and routine firefighting tends to become reactive rather than proactive, because reactive work has a deadline (something is broken now) and proactive work doesn't (nothing is broken yet). That's how patch cycles slip and security reviews get deferred — not from a lack of competence, but from an unreasonable scope for one person.
None of this is an argument against having internal IT capability. It's an argument for recognising that one generalist represents a coverage model with real, structural limits — and that additional depth, whether through another hire or a co-managed arrangement, is closing a genuine gap rather than adding redundancy for its own sake.
All technical perspectives