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It's an interesting question. And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consu

It's an interesting question. And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consumer product companies. That doesn't seem like an intuitive conclusion, but it's a hard circle to square. As someone who mostly builds internal tools (though in a very different context), it certainly seems like good systems are an Archimedean lever that acts as a force multiplier across the entire org. Yet, if good internal tooling was important, you think at least one company would have been able to achieve success partially on this basis. The consumer product industry is extremely competitive, so the counter-hypothesis of entrenched sclerotic incumbents refusing to pick up $20 bills off the sidewalk doesn't really seem likely.

seemslegit 7y ago
Internal tools are used by employees who unlike consumers will tolerate more usability friction, non-critical bugs and feature delays than consumers and will compensate for them with their own effort so the tools can still be critical in their core functionality but not polished or well-maintained. Ironically and anecdotally, WeWork tried to build a strong engineering org for their internal systems before it blew up.
MereInterest 7y ago
> And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consumer product companies. That is on the implicit assumption that businesses are reasonable, and accurately know how to manage tradeoffs. Your counter-hypothesis seems rather likely to me, if we look at the internal behavior of a company. When negotiating, the more dots that you need to connect before reaching "and then we get more money", the weaker of a negotiating position you have. It's the same reason why sales teams get bonuses for making sales, but developers don't get bonuses for enabling sales.
babesh 7y ago
Long feedback chains take longer to optimize so this is possible. Also one feedback would be to have the company fail. Another possibility is that it really is a tradeoff of where to focus. For example, we are now paying for our lack of preparation and sclerotic government with the economic and lives lost to covid-19. It just took between 3-10 years to pay the piper.
jedberg 7y ago
> And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consumer product companies. Or perhaps no one has realized the power of good internal tools, and so crappy tools are the status quo and no one needs to do better. But as soon as one company realizes the value of internal tools and it becomes a competitive advantage, other companies in that area will need to follow suit.
chillacy 7y ago
To the contrary, some of the most successful software companies have strong cultures of internal tools (think FAANG companies). How much of this is cause and effect I'm not sure though. To some extent it's easier to make investments in internal tooling if you're profitable.
- astrange 7y ago
  Facebook in particular seems to wildly overinvest in internal tools, and if you ask them why they don't use external stuff they tell you it's because "it doesn't scale". We get things like Phabricator and HHVM out of it, but they could've just not written those, and I'm pretty sure their business would be fine. They do it because it gets them promoted, and because FB and Google rely on hiring every engineer ever and giving them make-work so they won't leave and start a competitor.
  - epriest 7y ago
    Interesting! This isn't how I remember things at all. Do you know where you got this sense of things from, specifically? In particular, do you remember what gave you the impression that Facebook "overinvested" a large amount of effort into Phabricator, that I developed and open sourced Phabricator primarily to get promoted, that I built Phabricator because of scaling concerns, or that the primary value I provided to Facebook during my employment there was just in not starting a competitor?

seemslegit 7y ago

Internal tools are used by employees who unlike consumers will tolerate more usability friction, non-critical bugs and feature delays than consumers and will compensate for them with their own effort so the tools can still be critical in their core functionality but not polished or well-maintained. Ironically and anecdotally, WeWork tried to build a strong engineering org for their internal systems before it blew up.

MereInterest 7y ago

> And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consumer product companies. That is on the implicit assumption that businesses are reasonable, and accurately know how to manage tradeoffs. Your counter-hypothesis seems rather likely to me, if we look at the internal behavior of a company. When negotiating, the more dots that you need to connect before reaching "and then we get more money", the weaker of a negotiating position you have. It's the same reason why sales teams get bonuses for making sales, but developers don't get bonuses for enabling sales.

babesh 7y ago

Long feedback chains take longer to optimize so this is possible. Also one feedback would be to have the company fail. Another possibility is that it really is a tradeoff of where to focus. For example, we are now paying for our lack of preparation and sclerotic government with the economic and lives lost to covid-19. It just took between 3-10 years to pay the piper.

jedberg 7y ago

> And if the answer is no, I guess the logical conclusion is that internal tools make very little difference to the success of consumer product companies. Or perhaps no one has realized the power of good internal tools, and so crappy tools are the status quo and no one needs to do better. But as soon as one company realizes the value of internal tools and it becomes a competitive advantage, other companies in that area will need to follow suit.

chillacy 7y ago

To the contrary, some of the most successful software companies have strong cultures of internal tools (think FAANG companies). How much of this is cause and effect I'm not sure though. To some extent it's easier to make investments in internal tooling if you're profitable.

astrange 7y ago
Facebook in particular seems to wildly overinvest in internal tools, and if you ask them why they don't use external stuff they tell you it's because "it doesn't scale". We get things like Phabricator and HHVM out of it, but they could've just not written those, and I'm pretty sure their business would be fine. They do it because it gets them promoted, and because FB and Google rely on hiring every engineer ever and giving them make-work so they won't leave and start a competitor.
- epriest 7y ago
  Interesting! This isn't how I remember things at all. Do you know where you got this sense of things from, specifically? In particular, do you remember what gave you the impression that Facebook "overinvested" a large amount of effort into Phabricator, that I developed and open sourced Phabricator primarily to get promoted, that I built Phabricator because of scaling concerns, or that the primary value I provided to Facebook during my employment there was just in not starting a competitor?