[bruce511]

It's interesting (to me) that you see half a decade as "keeping" engineers. I've been working at the same place for 30, the other developers for over 20. Clearly we're insane :)

Also, you phrase "keeping them" as if that's the key goal. Having developers stay longer working on projects for longer, leveraging domain expertise, building relationships, getting a deeper understanding of the system and its architecture are all good. Merely keeping them though serves no purpose.

Frankly, if an outside tool is sufficient then use it. Once the spend on that tool exceeds 2x a salary then -consider- moving I in house. (15k a month is getting there.)

BUT factor in commitment costs. You can hire a guy to build it, but you're committing to that post "forever". You've now got one more thing to look after,one more emp to manage, one more non-core project consuming resources. Do this a few times, and, well....

It's a fine line. There are benefits to moving it in-house, but the costs are not trivial.

[withinboredom]

That's my mistake; I wasn't trying to imply that. I was merely trying to say that once you have a set of tools in-house, keeping engineers is a side-benefit. Not that you should do it for the sake of keeping engineers.

> It's interesting (to me) that you see half a decade as "keeping" engineers. I've been working at the same place for 30, the other developers for over 20. Clearly we're insane :)

Sounds like a place I'd like to work in the next couple of years. I've been doing startups lately where keeping an engineer longer than 2 years is a challenge. I could dig some stability again.