My team were employees. But the PM and several developers all came from a Canadian consulting firm. We were being project-managed from the outside. And any time some piece of functionality needed to be added, the new boss kept asking, "Why don't you just use a stored procedure for that?"
In the end, the boss decided to just fire everybody and replace us with Oracle stored procedures. Not even kidding, this is not a "things that didn't happen for $400, Alex".
That’s always a bad sign people justify with the work load generated by these same busy bodies