Inward-Looking for a Reason

Ahmet Alp Balkan has some interesting things to say about about the internal development culture at Microsoft. In particular, he criticizes the engineers there for living in their own world and not paying much attention to outside tools and systems. I think he has uncovered a real phenomenon, but hasn't dug deep enough to uncover why it happens.

It's true that engineers who work for large technical companies don't typically pay very much attention to external tools. And there's a good reason for that.

Companies like this already have extensive internal ecosystems of tools. These tools were built to work together with other company systems, they adhere to various internal development standards, have teams dedicated to supporting and enhancing them, and are already known and trusted by other engineers and management.

For any problem you are likely to encounter as an engineer, there is typically an existing system that already does what you need, or close. This tool can quite probably be improved or reconfigured to do what you need with less effort than it would take to bring in an outside tool and make it fit internal expectations.

Because of this, the smart bet is usually to use or extend existing solutions rather than exploring and importing new ones. And really, just learning all about the internal systems is a job in itself, quite enough to sate the curiosity of nearly anyone.