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Comment by vo1aQXJ3 | Hacker News Reader

which makes sense for them... Lets assume they went with your solution. All fine. up and running in no time. Then you get hit by a bus or leave the company. Then things go wrong. How are you going to explain this to senior management.

If they take IBM/Oracle/etc. and things go wrong? you call them. they fly over an exec you can beat up and all is fine.

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It's not irrational. I went from using an in-house DMS at my work to one made by Big Co. I'm sure it was more expensive, but at the end of the day, it's someone else's problem, not ours. If something goes wrong, there is someone we can call and tell at, someone else in charge of fixing bugs, etc. There are rational reasons to want those things.

IF you can really actually shove off the responsibility and all the attendant headache, yeah, sure, it's fine. I don't think I've ever been able to do that. Instead of spending my time trying to come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users, I'd spend my time contacting someone else in a different company to see if they've come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users.

If you really truly can just punt, sit back, and even get to say "I told you so" when the system/software/service in question doesn't work, that's great. But... in almost all cases I've experience, it was still 'my problem', I just had far less control over making it work.

True, but you're only dealing with the technical end of it. Later on your technical headache may be translated into dollar amounts for damages in a lawsuit or price negotiations in service agreements. But since that's legal and/or business stuff, chances are you won't be informed or consulted. You do the leg-work of getting the thing that's broken up and running again. Your manager does the tedious administrative business of estimating the value of resources spent on solving, the problem, which is added to the estimated losses sustained by other departments impacted by the outage. The people who negotiate expensive service and supply contracts are not interested in the minutiae of why something was broken, only in the measurable economic cost of the failure.

Suppose you rent your home and a plumbing problem leads to flooding and damage of some of your possessions. You take it up with the landlord and are credited two weeks' rent as compensation. Do you care about the specifics of the plumbing problem or the landlord's dealings with whatever plumber installed the system which later failed? Even if the plumber who turns up the house to fix the problem goes into detail about a previous plumber's ill-considered decision to apply PVC adhesive to ABS pipe, chances are that your interest is purely superficial.

In this case, I'm the plumber. I don't want to be in a position as a plumber where someone mandated that $pipeSystemX had be to used, for non-technical reasons, then it breaks, and I'm 'responsible', but can't fix it. The 'fix' is to replace some or all of it, but contractually, legally, I can't touch it, but the homeowners and neighbors keep coming to ME to 'fix' things, largely because no one else even answers the phone.

And turning it around, if a plumber told me "hey, I'm not allowed to replace this outdated hazardous inefficient $pipeSystemX"... yeah, I'd want to get in to some details.

I've been using this plumbing metaphor for a while, and believe me I feel your pain. Having since become a homeowner and having to deal with my own plumbing problems (or engage a plumber directly), I not appreciate why plumbers are so highly paid yet so grumpy :-|

I was tempted to say I didn't think your plumbing metaphor holds water, but I refrained.

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