What I got wrong is not knowing management’s priorities and accounting rules about where the cost shows up on a balance sheet. This had much more weight in deci

What I got wrong is not knowing management’s priorities and accounting rules about where the cost shows up on a balance sheet. This had much more weight in decision making simply because something works better for taxes (services purchased) vs large up front costs with maintenance (buying software) vs building it (labor costs plus a lot more time). When management already says buy instead of build, the actual technology being bought is much farther down the priority list than engineers want to admit.