It is amazing how many companies don't think they're software companies, even though they are 100% reliant on their in house software. "We aren't a software company" is even a direct excuse I've heard a few times to justify ignoring technical debt.
What's worse is companies who 100% outsource to customized versions of a vendor's code. At least banks own the source to what they run even if they can't run it without a license. Clothing company I know sitting next to amazon pays the equivalent of about 5 fte senior amazon engineers a year in licensing the software they run every year to a vendor who charges them another 5 engineers worth to implement all of the customizations they want and "re-negotiates" the contract every 3 years. I say negotiate because there's not really an alternative to switch, it'd be a 3 year conversion project and they refuse to hire devs.
They gave a 8k raise to most tech folks about 5 years ago because they were bleeding people across the street. Which brought their senior tech folk to within 20k of an amazon SDE intern salary. People still left.
I'm biased as an engineer but I'm not really sure why they keep this relationship going.
This is accountant math with capex vs opex. I don't know how but they manage to convince companies that their saving money by spending 10 times as much.
Might still be a good decision: the corporate politics get so much harder, once you have in-house teams. And: that company would probably fail at writing in-house software---most of them do.
Good point. I didn't think about the leverage of having an internal team holding you hostage vs and external.
And yes there is also the, how do you hire up a good dev team when you obviously don't know how to do software yourself. Eg hiring outside your competency. I know this is especially hard, and I've watched large companies who are good at hiring in general fail at it specifically in a wheel house. I think this is why aqui-hires can help.
Semi-related: that's why 'blockchain technology' can be so useful to banks. It's not that they need anything blockchain at all, but in practice CEOs are not actually all that powerful against the vested interests of middle management, but having the excuse of hyped up 'blockchain technology' can help with pushing through common-sensical reforms that you would want to do anyway.
Oh, American sports metaphors. They fly right over my head.
A situation where a hyped up 'blockchain' wouldn't be a good fit: when the organization is competent enough and/or the CEO has enough power to change things.
Google probably falls under the former. Amazon might fall under the former and definitely latter.
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
> 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
