[jsnell]

Seems like there's a pretty big difference between two groups duplicating the work of a handful of engineers, like in your query engine example, and billion dollar programs like in the article. My personal favorite example of the former were workflow systems; somewhere around 2009 Google had like 15 different ones. But obviously the reason was that nobody had foreseen such a need early enough, a lot groups ended up building their own solutions, and with so much fragmentation none of them could reach critical mass organically.

In terms of large scale and crippling internal competition, Nokia comes to mind with their utterly non-cooperating consumer vs. business mobile phone divisions back in the day.

[quantum_state]

It seems they have too many developers without better things to do ..

[compiler-guy]

I don’t think it is so much that they don’t have better things to do as it is that their primary project is blocked by some distant tool not quite doing what they need and unwilling or unable to make it do what they need.

So the engineers roll their own. It works perfectly well for their narrow use case , but is also half-baked for the general case.

Then a year later some distant team sees that you half baked solution would work for them if it were generalized a bit, but you don’t have the time or resources to help this distant team. So yet another half baked solution appears.