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I’ve had the opposite experience in recent years: Excess management and limited engineers leads to a desire to do deals, make contracts, and buy external soluti

I’ve had the opposite experience in recent years: Excess management and limited engineers leads to a desire to do deals, make contracts, and buy external solutions for everything. In many cases the integration costs are assumed to be $0 and we spent more time trying to make an external tool do something that could have been built in house in the same or less time.

llanowarelves 3y ago
And we can expect it to continue going that way for smaller companies, since the tax changes in the US wrt R&D means it's better to buy than build, all else being equal, due to the tax deduction not having to be spread over time.
JohnBooty 3y ago
we spent more time trying to make an external tool do something that could have been built in house in the same or less time. Yeah. :-/ There's also a version of the "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" fallacy/truism at work, right? If management picks $WELL_KNOWN_PRODUCT_XYZ and things go sideways... well, they don't look foolish. But if they rely on... some random in-house engineer and things don't work out, they look like fools. (Even though, in both cases, it actually just comes down to the same in-house engineers. Because the in-house engineers still need to do the integration work)
xmcqdpt2 3y ago
In my thankfully short time at a company that operated this way, there was no upside either. No decent engineer would stay there because there was nothing to build and management would always just contract out everything. Management, which was promoted internally from bad engineers, couldn't shop a good SaaS product or consulting firm and instead were consistently convinced into buying shitty Oracle products. In-house products were badly done, which led to contracting out engineering, which led to no engineers, which led to getting screwed in the contracting. Fixing that company would probably involve firing the whole tech department.

llanowarelves 3y ago

And we can expect it to continue going that way for smaller companies, since the tax changes in the US wrt R&D means it's better to buy than build, all else being equal, due to the tax deduction not having to be spread over time.

JohnBooty 3y ago

we spent more time trying to make an external tool do something that could have been built in house in the same or less time. Yeah. :-/ There's also a version of the "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" fallacy/truism at work, right? If management picks $WELL_KNOWN_PRODUCT_XYZ and things go sideways... well, they don't look foolish. But if they rely on... some random in-house engineer and things don't work out, they look like fools. (Even though, in both cases, it actually just comes down to the same in-house engineers. Because the in-house engineers still need to do the integration work)

xmcqdpt2 3y ago

In my thankfully short time at a company that operated this way, there was no upside either. No decent engineer would stay there because there was nothing to build and management would always just contract out everything. Management, which was promoted internally from bad engineers, couldn't shop a good SaaS product or consulting firm and instead were consistently convinced into buying shitty Oracle products. In-house products were badly done, which led to contracting out engineering, which led to no engineers, which led to getting screwed in the contracting. Fixing that company would probably involve firing the whole tech department.