> I frequently find myself with NIH syndrome. I just don't understand how we can make progress if we defer to "everything is a solved problem!" Progress involv

> I frequently find myself with NIH syndrome. I just don't understand how we can make progress if we defer to "everything is a solved problem!" Progress involves making the best changes we can. NIH syndrome means re-litigating small changes that aren't impactful rather than focusing on the new big ticket items that will really make a difference. What's the point in optimizing something that will have a negligible return when there are better opportunities? And there's also the important downside of NIH syndrome. It might just be that the people who solved the problem initially knew what they were doing and you'll discover years down the road that your solution doesn't help anyone make progress, it was actually a terrible mistake. Like the BART solution. The people who did this were aerospace engineers. They thought they were improving on train design. Well, they were not. They were ignoring important constraints you only learn about later: the fact that interoperability between train tracks is critical to long-term development and efficient operation. Extending BART is a nightmare, it cannot share track with other systems, you cannot move trains on other systems to get them to BART which makes it far more expensive to do anything, the parts are incredibly expensive now that the supply chain for them is tiny. Basically every commuter suffers every day because of this idiotic decision which keeps the system fragmented. And that's what NIH syndrome gets you. You think you're making progress. But you often just have a terrible understanding of the problem and you're building yourself long-term technical debt.