Contrast that with Go Daddy, my present employer. We build practically everything we use internally. There’s a couple of exceptions, but by and large management has confidence that we can do anything they want. I have never been happier and the difference was palpable within weeks of joining. It’s amazing when your knowledge and skill is appreciated.

Now imagine that this project evolves into a slightly more general purpose, yet still light weight and focussed system. It becomes open source, and gains just enough (actually useful) features to be popular. It also has enough clients that it gets pounded. Some of the students even look at the code and break it in certain ways.

I think I’d rather look at using the second option - a lot is to be said of software maturity (even if it does come with an initial learning/installation curve). Assuming the software in question is well tested, and solves the important problems, I think this cost is far lower than employing a team to create a custom one-off and hope they have the craftsmanship to create a well tested and usable application. Of course if this product doesn’t exist, it could be because this group needs to write it :)

I think this rule applies as the software in question becomes a larger burden to reimplement. I don’t think anyone would try to re-write MS Word because it doesn’t do something a particular way. For trivial applications, a custom one-off might be just the trick.

I think there should be a cut-off point at which the costs of reimplementation exceed those of adapting an existing solution. Of course, for the example above I think the one off was far superior to the other solutions.

“Banning the word is a good exercise for any analyst or writer. Try it some time. It makes you think about what you’re trying to communicate.”

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000127.html

They wourk have proposed a phased project:
2 weeks:
-authentication + adding grades to the database.
4 weeks:
??
6 weeks:
??

A new person is hired who quietly writes a simple grading system in PHP and MySQL without asking permission, and quietly gets all the teachers to do “beta testing”. This becomes the new system. After 2 years, all use of the previous commercial systems stop and no mention of them are ever made again, as if they never existed.

Then management hires a new senior teacher, “Fred”, who throws up his hands at the appalling IT standards, and pushes through approval for a new $100,000 grading system which has integrated payroll, accounting, inventory and teaching modules. The students crack the security in 1 week flat. It is declared a huge success. “Fred” gets promoted…

I have seen the same thing repeated many times, although usually with many millions of dollars being wasted. It’s so easy if the right salesperson takes the right executive out to lunch at the right time!

Essentially, internal devel is extremely dangerous if your
internal developers aren’t good enough. Or are unwilling to play
outside of the organization.

Or are not permitted to play outside the organization as is probably the more common case until recently.

Essentially, internal devel is extremely dangerous if your internal developers aren’t good enough. Or are unwilling to play outside of the organization.