I used to have a boss who took this logic to an extreme and basically preached “always buy, never build”
Problems mounted - cost, security, integration issues, performance, ... - we couldn’t do anything about any of that, because we just wrote glue code to combine all the SaaS stuff.
I think about that job from time to time and I have two theories as to why this guy was like this - a) lack of trust/knowledge his engineers can build stuff, b) bragging about using a shiny-new-tech is better than talking about writing a Python script that saves data to Postgres.
All in all - good points in the article, but there is more to the decision (as hinted in the summary), building stuff is not just about scratching one’s itch.
Problems mounted - cost, security, integration issues, performance, ... - we couldn’t do anything about any of that, because we just wrote glue code to combine all the SaaS stuff.
I think about that job from time to time and I have two theories as to why this guy was like this - a) lack of trust/knowledge his engineers can build stuff, b) bragging about using a shiny-new-tech is better than talking about writing a Python script that saves data to Postgres.
All in all - good points in the article, but there is more to the decision (as hinted in the summary), building stuff is not just about scratching one’s itch.