[matt_o]

> I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square.

I wrapped a 2-year stint at Facebook recently and my experience was similar to yours.

Some tools were amazing and cool and I really appreciated how they evolved over time to manage huge amounts of resources. But most were subpar when compared to OSS tooling - outdated, deprecated functionality, very little documentation, very few people working on them. The common approach was to learn about "the duct tape" way to make something work, then pass it on to new engineers.

An example would be tool X for working with diffs (PRs). It's the latest and greatest, except that it only covers 75% of its predecessor's, tool Y's, functionality, so you end up learning both. Tool Y has been "deprecated" for the past 3-4 years. Some of its features don't work, but you'll only know when you try and execute them.

[hinkley]

You have to make some allowances for first movers. The designs of new tools are often ill conceived because they have no templates to steal ideas from. But the emotional investment often keeps them from switching to better tools because We’ve Always Done Things This Way.

The thing that bugs me most about my company’s tools are the ones that are enough younger than OSS solutions that someone either didn’t look very hard, or didn’t want to find anything (so they could write their own). Other priorities come along and those tools eventually can’t keep up with OSS alternatives, but the apologists take over.

You will not continue to get accolades for tools you wrote three years ago. The only “value” you derive is the time and effort it saves, offset my the effort expended. The time and effort expense of external tools are often lower. And, when the tools are annoying, you can commiserate with your coworkers instead of being the target of their criticisms. Which is often under-appreciated.