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Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!

Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic !

That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ...

I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?

What competitive advantage do you get from having dairy farmers on staff?

Compared to the competitive advantage of having a software developer on staff?

Do you actually do professional software development ? Even huge tech companies fail development projects spectacularly, non-tech companies trying to develop business critical software when superior alternative is available at reasonable prices ? You'd have a self inflicted competitive disadvantage. With first you might have a recruiting gimmick.

Sure, this is ideal given unlimited time and money, but hiring dedicated devs for tooling is going to be expensive. And once they fix "the problem," they're still on payroll. Yay they'll keep fixing problems and improving the software, but it's basically the most expensive software subscription model imaginable.

Good thing they invented contracting… several hundred years ago?

Contracting requires the devs to get up to speed on the software and your company needs. On the other hand, a private company selling commercial software has a comparative advantage in already knowing the codebase and user needs.

10 companies each contracting 1 dev for an open-source project is a less-efficient allocation of resources than 1 company hiring 10 devs for their commercial software project.

Lost in the noise when the community is large enough.

I'd appreciate it if you could provide some evidence for your claim that comparative advantage is "lost in the noise."

Efficient allocation of scarce resources is best achieved with comparative advantages. A commercial software team has shared context, management, and knowledge that cannot be as efficiently achieved by a decentralized community of contributors. So the commercial team can produce the same software at a cheaper cost. This is a good thing for the economy.

Design tools are a multi-billion dollar market in just the US, and useful worldwide. Potential resources are not even a bit scarce.

Figma already did the hard work of prod/tech design and fixing browsers, meaning followers will have a much easier path. https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...

The same short-term thinking has been espoused at the dawn of every innovation. Thankfully some folks don’t listen.

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