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babyHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Damn, that really reminds me of a previous company I worked for, that wanted to replace important …

… Damn, that really reminds me of a previous company I worked for, that wanted to replace important core internal libraries with open source libraries. My argument was always that we should always have in-house knowledge of the core technologies. I think a lot of companies fail to think long-term. > Listen more to your own employees about how to save cost than to any outside business consultants who have never run a factory producing your kind of product. In any event, if the advice they offer changes every year, it cannot possibly be correct. This one is the difference between management-driven company and engineers-driven company.

Original discussion‘This Has Been Going on for Years’: Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess321 source comments · at import
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RD
rdtscHN

The paper from 2001 by Dr. LJ Hart-Smith, referenced in the article is just as interesting as the article itself https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-... If you squint, could apply some of those observation to the world of software. For a TL;DR just skip to Hart-Smith's recommendations list at the end of the paper. Here are the ones I liked: > Look continuously at the entire activity. Do not minimize costs in isolation. Understand that one global cost minimization is worth far more than even 20 sub-optimum cost reductions. > Retain sufficient in-house production manufacturing that it is possible for future engineers to acquire the skills needed to develop new products, without which all businesses will fail. Even the work that is out-sourced requires internal expertise to write the specifications. > Acknowledge that cost-saving techniques that work in other high-v…

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GR
groestlHN

Open source is different, in that you as a company can become maintainer and therefore expert of that component _and_ profit of other work being upstreamed. In case the library is not your USP, I think it's not that clear cut.

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HI
hinkleyHN

I can hire people who have expertise in oss libraries. I have to build people who have expertise in our in house stuff. Importantly, we can sit around and bond over bitching about how bad one of those libraries is. If the authors are or were internal, we are now being divisive and unprofessional.

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