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To the contrary, some of the most successful software companies have strong cultures of internal tools (think FAANG companies). How much of this is cause and effect I'm not sure though. To some extent it's easier to make investments in internal tooling if you're profitable.

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Facebook in particular seems to wildly overinvest in internal tools, and if you ask them why they don't use external stuff they tell you it's because "it doesn't scale". We get things like Phabricator and HHVM out of it, but they could've just not written those, and I'm pretty sure their business would be fine.

They do it because it gets them promoted, and because FB and Google rely on hiring every engineer ever and giving them make-work so they won't leave and start a competitor.

Interesting! This isn't how I remember things at all. Do you know where you got this sense of things from, specifically?

In particular, do you remember what gave you the impression that Facebook "overinvested" a large amount of effort into Phabricator, that I developed and open sourced Phabricator primarily to get promoted, that I built Phabricator because of scaling concerns, or that the primary value I provided to Facebook during my employment there was just in not starting a competitor?

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