Comment by RevEng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RevEng | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the centralization thought. I'm working on a project to create a central AI platform for a very large corporation. As you can imagine, such a large company already has several different platforms made by different branches within it. Each branch has something they are relatively happy with. But corporate sees this redundancy as waste, so they want to consolidate it into one.

The problem with one is the same with any other single source: you are stuck with whatever they offer on whatever timelines they provide. You are sharing this with a hundred thousand other people, so it's not tailored to your use case, but either made as generic as possible, or full of irrelevant features. Both of these cases make it worse for you.

I have often made in house libraries either based on or completely replacing a free equivalent because the free one doesn't meet our needs and has extra complications we don't need. Yes, it comes with its costs, but sometimes it's worth it for something that genuinely meets your needs.

By forcing everybody to use the same common platform, you are either forcing them to work around the mismatch between the platform and their needs, or your are forcing the platform to provide for everyone's needs. Neither is efficient and it harms every other user.

If you are going to make your own, you had better have a good reason for it, but you shouldn't be forced into a single solution for everything - it can end up being more expensive than making a few special purpose applications.

As end user of one such platform, thank you giving me hope that at least some people are at least putting in an effort to make decent. We currently have a very weird mix of features applied to everyone and we are not all quite the same almost by definition.

What are you disagreeing with in TFA though? I agree with your points, I just think there are counterpoints and this needs to be decided on a case by case basis

From TFA:

> The second common variant is, instead of centralizing a service so that everyone in the company uses it, every department does it on their own. Department managers like it because it’s one less party not reporting to them to depend on (and nothing scares managers more than needing things from people not reporting to them.) And the people managing the department managers like it because they don’t need to deal with the centralized service department allegedly failing — and having to figure out if that’s really true and how to fix it, or if it’s an excuse made up by the other departments for failing at their own job. Here, too, if outcomes are what concerns you rather than what's easiest for senior leadership, standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make.

The argument is that centralization is the better outcome, even if it's less appealing to leadership. My counter argument is that centralization has downsides that need to be considered; it isn't inherently better.

No, the argument is that it's less appealing to leadership even when it's the better outcome, but not vice versa - it might or might not be better for reasons unrelated to said appeal ("standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make.")

And of course you can also end up standardizing on something because it benefits someone good at politics even though it's a bad idea, I just didn't elaborate on this stuff because it is too far away from the subject. I didn't say you should always stanardize on something though, I said that it was a hard decision

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