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Common HN comments: "I could build/setup/run this myself" It's a SAAS tool and you could build it? Well hot damn, you must be a programmer! I'm stunned by how

by wwalser 10y ago

Common HN comments: "I could build/setup/run this myself" It's a SAAS tool and you could build it? Well hot damn, you must be a programmer! I'm stunned by how many refuse to learn from Gmail (mailserver), Dropbox (intra-company sharing), Slack (IRC), AWS (servers), the list goes on. What a severe waste of your potential. Someone else has built a better version than you will ever build because they are focused 100% on this one specific problem. Even better - the cost of building, serving, and maintaining it are amortized across a larger user base with a small profit tacked on top. If you can't use a SAAS because of privacy/security concerns, totally get it, that's how it goes some times. If you refuse to use one because of not-built-here syndrome, you're wasting company resources and making yourself less valuable along the way. Companies pay for solutions, not this-was-built-here tools.

jdavis703 10y ago
I think some of this reaction is because then someone from the non-engineering side of the business is like "let's use this" even though it's over-engineered for your use case (i.e. a one line if statement branching on a query parameters or something). Now I realize the platform they're providing is way more than that, and for advanced cases it would be totally valid (i.e. we only want to launch this for 10% of logged out North American users after Jan 1st).
stdbrouw 10y ago
For me, I think it's not so much NIH syndrome but resentment at pricing among analytics products that seems calibrated to extract as much value from the customer as possible, which they can do because there is so little direct competition and because the ROI is usually still positive. It's a perfectly rational pricing strategy, of course, but it can sometimes feel like one of those economics experiments: "A colleague receives 100 dollars and is asked to split it between him and yourself. If you disagree with the split, neither of you gets anything. Your colleague proposes to give you 10 dollars and keep 90 himself. Do you choose to accept the 10 dollars, or would you prefer both of you get nothing?" Also, your examples are about ancillary utilities, but let's say you're a data scientist and you decide to build your own A/B testing system instead of using one of the existing services out there. If you add up all the dev time and maintenance time the homegrown system will probably be way more expensive, but on the other hand building it might teach you a bunch of intangible skills that make you a better experimenter and that could be worth the expense if the company expects employees to stick around for a while. Having said that, personally I still prefer to just pay for something. But I'm not at all stunned when other people do decide to roll their own tools.
sbov 10y ago
It probably isn't targeted at those users. If you're a small shop and just need feature flags, this is probably overkill. Recognize that there's a cost to pulling in 3rd party libraries, much less 3rd party services, into your project. It's not just the cost to integrate, but of figuring out failure modes. The offering can evolve to no longer serve your use case. They could deprecate the API, causing you to have to update current, and past, projects. Google can buy them and shut them down. If you take this approach for everything someone has a SAAS for, you could spend more time responding to their changes than evolving your own product. Been there, done that - it isn't fun.
pritianka 10y ago
100% agree. I can't recount how many times I've worked with people who wanted to build their own tools or only rely on their own information. I once worked with a dev who refused to talk to people better at systems engineering when we started reaching scaling issues. His claim - this is too specialized. Having gotten into infrastructure engineering recently and spent time working on microservices based architectures I realize that this was more of a "I built a shitty system and I don't want to show it to people".
primitivesuave 10y ago
I think this may be generalizing a bit too much. Certainly I would use Twilio instead of building my own telephony system, or use AWS instead of setting up my own servers. But in this case I think the reason many developers here (myself included) have an episode of build-it-myself syndrome is the many millions in funding and exorbitant pricing for something that seems (but may not necessarily be) trivial to implement. Obviously there is the benefit of having a team of people who are constantly making the system better and more robust. I think with ML there would be a serious value proposition here, e.g. allow a learning system to automatically roll out a new feature for you, and reverse the rollout if things appear to be going poorly. Even the worst case of built-it-myself syndrome would not engineer a custom feature flag system that far.
eldavido 10y ago
I think it's an issue of industry maturity, too. Let's say you want to open a restaurant. Now sure, you could go out, start a farm, open a steel mill and a mine to make all your knives and cutlery yourself, cut down timber and construct the entire building yourself, make your own furniture, etc. Really, you could do all of those things. And I think that's the state of the software world, about 10 years ago. Hell, maybe even today, compared to 10 years from now. These days, we're rapidly moving to a world where probably 95% of what a typical company needs -- code hosting, scaled relational storage, execution grids a la Docker on ECS, load balancers, A/B testing, SMS infrastructure, feature flags, etc. can be bought off the shelf, for a fraction of what it would cost to do yourself, and at much higher quality than a single individual could do. It's a natural outgrowth of the increase in developer salaries, in fact, the two go hand-in-hand: labor productivity is up a lot because of these tools, and the incentive to buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff is higher than ever, vs. paying for expensive, scarce, flighty developer labor. I do wonder what this means about starting companies, though. I think software will increasingly move toward an industry where, like owning a Burger King, you have to raise capital (rather than just doing everything yourself) because so much of what you need has to be bought, and peoples' standards are so high. And yet, it is more optimal to have to raise capital, because anyone can get money; not everyone has the skills/talent/know-how to build complicated software. Buying is less risky than building. No longer is it enough to home-roll a webserver: now you need to launch from day 1 with a native mobile app on multiple platforms, everything has to work on any size of display, it all has to be bug-free, high-design, autocomplete-text-boxed, perfection, from day 1. This whole "it's getting so cheap to ship a v1" is malarkey, IMO.

by wwalser 10y ago

jdavis703 10y ago

I think some of this reaction is because then someone from the non-engineering side of the business is like "let's use this" even though it's over-engineered for your use case (i.e. a one line if statement branching on a query parameters or something). Now I realize the platform they're providing is way more than that, and for advanced cases it would be totally valid (i.e. we only want to launch this for 10% of logged out North American users after Jan 1st).

stdbrouw 10y ago

For me, I think it's not so much NIH syndrome but resentment at pricing among analytics products that seems calibrated to extract as much value from the customer as possible, which they can do because there is so little direct competition and because the ROI is usually still positive. It's a perfectly rational pricing strategy, of course, but it can sometimes feel like one of those economics experiments: "A colleague receives 100 dollars and is asked to split it between him and yourself. If you disagree with the split, neither of you gets anything. Your colleague proposes to give you 10 dollars and keep 90 himself. Do you choose to accept the 10 dollars, or would you prefer both of you get nothing?" Also, your examples are about ancillary utilities, but let's say you're a data scientist and you decide to build your own A/B testing system instead of using one of the existing services out there. If you add up all the dev time and maintenance time the homegrown system will probably be way more expensive, but on the other hand building it might teach you a bunch of intangible skills that make you a better experimenter and that could be worth the expense if the company expects employees to stick around for a while. Having said that, personally I still prefer to just pay for something. But I'm not at all stunned when other people do decide to roll their own tools.

sbov 10y ago

It probably isn't targeted at those users. If you're a small shop and just need feature flags, this is probably overkill. Recognize that there's a cost to pulling in 3rd party libraries, much less 3rd party services, into your project. It's not just the cost to integrate, but of figuring out failure modes. The offering can evolve to no longer serve your use case. They could deprecate the API, causing you to have to update current, and past, projects. Google can buy them and shut them down. If you take this approach for everything someone has a SAAS for, you could spend more time responding to their changes than evolving your own product. Been there, done that - it isn't fun.

pritianka 10y ago

100% agree. I can't recount how many times I've worked with people who wanted to build their own tools or only rely on their own information. I once worked with a dev who refused to talk to people better at systems engineering when we started reaching scaling issues. His claim - this is too specialized. Having gotten into infrastructure engineering recently and spent time working on microservices based architectures I realize that this was more of a "I built a shitty system and I don't want to show it to people".

primitivesuave 10y ago

I think this may be generalizing a bit too much. Certainly I would use Twilio instead of building my own telephony system, or use AWS instead of setting up my own servers. But in this case I think the reason many developers here (myself included) have an episode of build-it-myself syndrome is the many millions in funding and exorbitant pricing for something that seems (but may not necessarily be) trivial to implement. Obviously there is the benefit of having a team of people who are constantly making the system better and more robust. I think with ML there would be a serious value proposition here, e.g. allow a learning system to automatically roll out a new feature for you, and reverse the rollout if things appear to be going poorly. Even the worst case of built-it-myself syndrome would not engineer a custom feature flag system that far.

eldavido 10y ago

I think it's an issue of industry maturity, too. Let's say you want to open a restaurant. Now sure, you could go out, start a farm, open a steel mill and a mine to make all your knives and cutlery yourself, cut down timber and construct the entire building yourself, make your own furniture, etc. Really, you could do all of those things. And I think that's the state of the software world, about 10 years ago. Hell, maybe even today, compared to 10 years from now. These days, we're rapidly moving to a world where probably 95% of what a typical company needs -- code hosting, scaled relational storage, execution grids a la Docker on ECS, load balancers, A/B testing, SMS infrastructure, feature flags, etc. can be bought off the shelf, for a fraction of what it would cost to do yourself, and at much higher quality than a single individual could do. It's a natural outgrowth of the increase in developer salaries, in fact, the two go hand-in-hand: labor productivity is up a lot because of these tools, and the incentive to buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff is higher than ever, vs. paying for expensive, scarce, flighty developer labor. I do wonder what this means about starting companies, though. I think software will increasingly move toward an industry where, like owning a Burger King, you have to raise capital (rather than just doing everything yourself) because so much of what you need has to be bought, and peoples' standards are so high. And yet, it is more optimal to have to raise capital, because anyone can get money; not everyone has the skills/talent/know-how to build complicated software. Buying is less risky than building. No longer is it enough to home-roll a webserver: now you need to launch from day 1 with a native mobile app on multiple platforms, everything has to work on any size of display, it all has to be bug-free, high-design, autocomplete-text-boxed, perfection, from day 1. This whole "it's getting so cheap to ship a v1" is malarkey, IMO.