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Reminds me of a similar situation with my technical manager. He’s very dogmatic in that we should never waste time “re-inventing the wheel” (e.g. there’s alread

by Rury 7y ago

Reminds me of a similar situation with my technical manager. He’s very dogmatic in that we should never waste time “re-inventing the wheel” (e.g. there’s already a library/tool out there that does X, don’t waste time remaking it). This makes a lot of sense in many business cases, but not always... I like using this analogy to demonstrate why: Say we’re designing a race car, and our race car needs wheels. “Wait!” says my manager, “don’t waste time designing wheels for our car when we can simply buy these wheels from a vendor and slap it on our car!” I look at the wheels. “Uh, sure those are wheels, but they’re wheels designed for a shopping cart! I mean sure we could slap these on our racecar but it’s then going to drive like crap!” If you want a great product, sometimes you’re better off re-inventing the wheel… (and not using a “No Code” solution…)

kls 7y ago
The problem is sometimes you get the converse where developers have the "not invented here" mentality. I interviewed at a shop one time where they had built their own JS framework. Mind you this was a financial shop not a tech shop. They bellied up about 2 years after I interviewed with them and I cannot help but reason that they had "tech gone wild" as one of the reasons. The CEO fashioned his company as the Google of the financial industry but in the end they where a bunch of developers stroking their ego. It is a balancing act, a lot of times building on what exists is the best case but when it comes to your core competency and what distinguishes your business, that is where one should focus their development efforts. If you are rewriting Postgres you will just end up with a shittier database.
- Rury 7y ago
  Totally agree it's a balancing act. Sometimes the existing tool is exactly what you need, in which it would be a waste to re-invent it. Ideally though, things should be evaluated case by case, rather than sticking to a dogma. I just happen to work at a company that's experienced the flip side of your experience. We ended up wasting millions on software some managers thought fit our needs. However, turns out it really didn't fit our needs after all was said and done, and they said if they had known everything up front (rather than what the salesman had said) they wouldn't have bought the software in the first place.

by Rury 7y ago

kls 7y ago

The problem is sometimes you get the converse where developers have the "not invented here" mentality. I interviewed at a shop one time where they had built their own JS framework. Mind you this was a financial shop not a tech shop. They bellied up about 2 years after I interviewed with them and I cannot help but reason that they had "tech gone wild" as one of the reasons. The CEO fashioned his company as the Google of the financial industry but in the end they where a bunch of developers stroking their ego. It is a balancing act, a lot of times building on what exists is the best case but when it comes to your core competency and what distinguishes your business, that is where one should focus their development efforts. If you are rewriting Postgres you will just end up with a shittier database.

Rury 7y ago
Totally agree it's a balancing act. Sometimes the existing tool is exactly what you need, in which it would be a waste to re-invent it. Ideally though, things should be evaluated case by case, rather than sticking to a dogma. I just happen to work at a company that's experienced the flip side of your experience. We ended up wasting millions on software some managers thought fit our needs. However, turns out it really didn't fit our needs after all was said and done, and they said if they had known everything up front (rather than what the salesman had said) they wouldn't have bought the software in the first place.