Comment by whartung

Ages ago I worked at a DoD contractor. I was in a special projects department.

The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.

What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.

But that's where my special project group came in.

We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.

Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.

It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.

You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.