[tmnvdb]

Another sure sign of this is custom internal tooling for things that are not business specific like time tracking and report generation.

A company I worked at had an IT budget of 5000 euro for 120 people (90% SWE). The logic was: if we buy a commercial solution for time tracking our IT budget will double. Instead super senior engineer Y is maintaining his "free" in-house solution with half the feature set.

All of these problems are about not taking the cost of expensive engineering time and energy into account in a rational way.