Comment by habinero

> I'm not saying we don't have bugs or bad things don't happen but I don't see why you think that externally purchased software is automatically better

If you staff an entire team to build apps, update, maintain and deploy changes to them, and run a call rotation, and that's all you do, there's no problem. You just have an internal development team. That's completely fine.

What's not fine is the people going "how hard could it be to replace Y" and slapping something together. Those sort of skunkworks projects have a couple common common failure modes:

1. the project fails after a lot of wasted effort 2. the project succeeds...but is never productionized. The person who wrote it is now stuck writing it forever. Which they might like, but it's miserable if they quit or retired or get hit by a bus aka the bus factor.

If the bus factor is one, that is pretty much always pain.

The point of SaaS and service-contract type enterprise software is not that they are perfect and great and not buggy. Enterprise software sucks a lot. SaaS is usually "you get what you get".

The point is you can't halfass it. Either you go whole ass and staff out a big enough development team (with all the expense and difficulties implied) or you go none ass and buy.