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It's also a risk mitigation strategy. As your company's size grows, so does the liability of your dependencies that you don't control. If you can throw a few
by cle 6y ago
It's also a risk mitigation strategy. As your company's size grows, so does the liability of your dependencies that you don't control. If you can throw a few engineers at a problem and save yourself tens of millions of dollars in risk, it's worth it.
- gav 6y agoIt’s not risk mitigation, more a risk swap between “unknown risk”—we don’t know if this third-party product is going to meet our future needs—and “known risk”—we have full control while we are willing to write checks to fund it. In the latter case there’s still plenty of risk: you might be spending valuable time building something that doesn’t work, is obsoleted by future change or future products; and the one that most people dismiss, you will be at the mercy of its creators. The people who build your critical technologies will have power over the organization you might regret later, and if they do leave, finding replacements can be hard and/or expensive.
- caust1c 6y agoSpot on! Never thought about it from this perspective. :-)
- cle 6y agoThe net risk reduction of course depends on specific situations, it is not always better and it is not always a "swap". In some cases, eliminating unknowns reduces more risk than is added by building in-house, which is when it makes sense to build in-house.