[danaris]

> Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti

I think when you see this you need to start digging deeper and questioning why this is happening.

Is it because the "grunts" are genuinely bad at their jobs? If this is the case, then who hired them?

Or is it because they have been conditioned to believe that if they ask for permission to use an outside tool/library/etc, they will be told "no, we don't have the budget for that" or "that has to go through 12 layers of approval" or "great idea! we'll get it into a committee to talk about the best way to implement it and get back to you (in 6-12 months)"?

In other words: Are they building NIH spaghetti not because they lack oversight, but because they have too much, that hampers them from actually doing their damn jobs?

[Terr_]

I'd like to add that NIH spaghetti sometimes comes from customer relationships rather than from exuberant developers.

The important customer wants just one tiny convenience-feature that fits their use case and it sorta makes sense... Which somehow keeps scope-creeping over time into a cancerous unplanned product which is expensive to support.

With the benefit of hindsight, you realize it's something the customer should have bought directly for themselves from a completely separate and more-qualified vendor. However they either didn't realize what they wanted or they were able to trick you into building an over-specialized product for their use case--for much cheaper than if they had hired a contractor to customize another better offering.

[cruffle_duffle]

Don’t forget incentive structures that award developers for “org wide impact”. Often the way to do that is to roll your own crap instead of use off the shelf stuff. This is how you wind up with developers creating their own key-value databases or billing systems… it sounds much better to write these from scratch.