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Comment by Tabular-Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

It’s all fun and games until you start applying this to commercial software projects.

It’s interesting how open source kind of short-circuits a lot of this; you can’t “acquire” it all because you already have it all. You can acquire experience in a lot of tools, but that’s actually acquiring practical knowledge, not just acquisition of things as things.

Well, it short-circuits the licensing cost argument for rolling your own frameworks, but I don’t think that was ever the real reason why devs love reinventing the wheel.

I think that building frameworks is just a lot more fun than doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is usually a soul-sucking grind of boring enterprise tickets.

I am the other way. I like others to make good frameworks and I like building the customer facing thing.

Have you worked with eager designers who love to reinvent everything?

Luckily no

Maybe that’s exactly why they do it. Building frameworks is as customer facing as it gets, because the customers are your coworkers that you can just walk over to and speak directly with.

If one is so insulated from the actual business problem by corporate bureaucracy it may be the only way for developers to do something that matters to someone, no matter how frivolous it is in the grand scheme.

I feel like one equivalent of problematic hoarding in software is adding feature after feature by stacking complex dependencies until nobody can maintain it without tripping over the jenga piles.

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