There is certainly a balance. When I want to implement feature X a client has requested but I have to deal with home grown database abstraction layers and custo

There is certainly a balance. When I want to implement feature X a client has requested but I have to deal with home grown database abstraction layers and custom AJAX API structures - I get the feeling that a third party library probably does it better and has more eyes on the code than exist at my company. That said I would probably not look to a third party library to just to simple data transformation stuff. Probably the only thing I do copy almost verbatim from SO are things like Awk/Sed commands that are easy/low risk to test but would take hours to derive myself.