> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work
Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise.
As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie somewhere in the middle.
I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building tools in bad faith to consume money. It’s just that in the end, “solve everything” means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual features that companies all have in common.
That works both ways. 70% of features are common with other businesses, but the feature set is pretty diverse. My experience is that internal folk with a good understanding of the business hit 90-95% of the requirements without implementing the 200% of non-relevant broader industry requirements. YMMV.
The off the shelf solutions are designed to fit everyone, while bespoke solutions are designed just for you. A lot of the complexity in off the shelf software is that generality that might never be needed.
And often the features you need are much easier to implement than you might have expected and, due to the generalisation complexity, hacking on the off-the-shelf product often much more difficult.
Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise.
As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie somewhere in the middle.