7
AleCx04
3y

I told my new Director that I am not one for going with third party vendors. He claimed that I was biased. I am really.

But I told him that support and troubleshooting are the main reasons why I dislike third party vendors as well as the request for X software to do Y non supported thing, they always state during a sales call that they can accommodate, they never do.

As an example, I send them the logs of a support ticket for one particular piece of software that we have, for which I detailed the situation, only for them to NEVER respond and then after 5 days close the ticket stating that I never replied back to them, even when they never replied back.

A custom made in house solution will always be superior to your run of the mill all encompassing app. But try and make a non dev understand this. I wish my old director was back. I miss the fuck out of that dude. Loved working for him.

Comments
  • 2
    After long enough in the game, I do get why they are reluctant to. I have seen some insane implementations of things that could have come off the shelf, and it can become as, if not more, expensive - if you're the one parting with the cash, or having to explain spending someone else's, it's pretty tough to run with 'we have X devs building Y' when Z has already written it.
  • 5
    It definitely depends on who is developing the in-house solution and whether you have support infrastructure set up for it. My team is currently migrating a horrendous in-house solution to a vendor SaaS platform because the people who wrote the in-house solution all quit when they were asked to support it.

    After it was handed off to us, we saw why. It's a fucking mess written by developers who clearly lost touch with reality.
  • 2
    @MM83 and I agree with you 100%, but man for the most part I dislike having to build solutions to integrate with something because the thing they purchased does not do X thing.
  • 0
    @EmberQuill acceptable and understandable
  • 1
    I work across in house an vendor based software, and I agree and disagree.

    In house is usually more productive and can quickly make changes.

    Vendor is usually more stable but slow to make changes if they can.

    Hybrid is also a good compromise at times where it's a vendor platform but the dev can be done in house.
  • 0
    @AleCx04 I do agree with you about sales calls though. Salespeople always promise things even if the devs can't deliver them. There is actually one product we're using (an orchestration SaaS product for EKS clusters) that is missing so many promised features that our entire dev team wants to drop it and use EKS directly.
  • 0
    @AleCx04 yeah the problem is that, much of the time, they're then opting to listen to a sales pitch over their own engineers. Although that's admittedly wonderful for team morale, it can cause problems down the line.
  • 1
    "A custom made in house solution will always be superior to your run of the mill all encompassing app."

    no.

    that's ONLY if you are competent enough to actually achieve those high goals. from my experience: 98% of people are not, but believe they are.

    the software systems at my first employer were this kind of shitshow. spaghetticode wrapped around a decades-old ERM-system.

    please introspect if you don't just suffer from "not invented here": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  • 4
    In my experience, it's hard to get management to go with in house because they're seeing a third party solution as a smaller cost to them than potential profit from having devs doing something else
  • 2
    @katvoira I came here to say this.

    I agree, a custom tool is often better because it can do anything you want, but that comes with a substantial cost (in both dollars and hours, plus maintenance) that’s simply too high for management to justify.
  • 0
    @tosensei we do have the manpower and talent to do this. On the other hand, we have 3 applications that are dying and are massively used in our organization that have the customer support of a fridge-forgotten tomtato.

    While anecdotal evidence is pretty pointless, I would have rather built those applications in house using our large team of devs than to continuously submit support tickets to the third party only for them to come back 3 weeks later and/or closing in tickets that they never answer. So I agree with you, but disagree to some extent
  • 1
    @Root true. But I am now having to explain to upper management why 3 apps are getting 0 support from companies that still exist and are around.
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