The city civil service bureaucracy is a mess for sure. I think every department would benefit from a more streamlined set of job descriptions, and I also think it needs to be easier to hire from outside the system for jobs that require specific skillsets instead of just promoting existing city employees.

In this case, it seems like the main benefit of outsourcing a lot of these jobs is that you can bypass the city bureaucracy, but if you fixed the bureaucracy you wouldn't need to outsource as much. It seems really inefficient to have vendors skimming money off employees' paychecks just so the city can avoid having to follow its own rules, although I'm sure the vendors have no complaints about the arrangement.