A pattern I see with some companies -- usually, but not always, companies with little turnover, which leads to internal stagnation -- is the foundational belief

A pattern I see with some companies -- usually, but not always, companies with little turnover, which leads to internal stagnation -- is the foundational belief that THEY ARE VERY SPECIAL and need things done a CERTAIN WEIRD WAY that is not supported by any commercial offering. Often, this leads to homegrown solutions that are never at feature-parity with COTS options, but have the benefit of costing more. If they buy something instead, they festoon it with a bunch of customization and external, parallel tools that must be kept in sync at the data and configuration level for everything to "work". What they NEVER do is re-examine their assumptions about how they must work, or interrogate why they can't go the same route as the bulk of the market on these points and thus have a simpler, more maintainable, less frustrating system in place. It's not quite this bad, but it's ALMOST like a company insisting that "well, here, for historical reasons, 2 and 2 are 5, not 4, so we have to do . . . . " It's exhausting, but OTOH, well, to the extend that my employer is involved, we tell them our recommendations but ultimately bill by the hour.