Can you guarantee success at development? And even if you can, is it a good idea?
The coolest software project I've ever been on was also the dumbest. We were trying to build a bios in-house - something that can be bought off-the-shelf for a buck. In theory, it could have saved us millions in the long run. In the short run, we were wasting man-months of engineering on something that was not our business, when the clock was ticking loudly. Fun as heck, but if I caught my own employees doing such a thing today, I'd at least threaten to fire them if they even thought about it again.
Likewise, Soylent is not in the inventory management business. Why should they be writing inventory management software? Buy that stuff. Focus development money on the core business.
Funny you say that. I just had a conversation about a meeting I was involved in a few years back when our EE's didn't understand why we thought it was a spectacularly bad idea to design our own Pentium-class CPU boards vs. just buying them off the shelf.
Cost advantage? What's that? We just want a cool project!
It's not crappy management for engineers to have technically cool ideas that are bad business, and then rationalize their value. It's bad management to let them execute on them (except if you have some sort of do-what-you-want time for developers, which is a good way to compensate and balance for this).
On the other side of the coin, you have the semi-technical manager who has ideas that are unassailable, because they are able to make "do this that way or you're fired" decisions.
These kinds of managers are utterly toxic. At the slightest hint of this kind of behavior, I'd be reaching out to my contacts to find new employment, where I would certainly be paid better, but hopefully don't have a feudal work environment.
