Ageism is definitely part of it, but most people just don't seem to care to learn in general, and of course the incentives are against it.
They'd rather treat the general version of Greenspun's 10th rule as a commandment, and create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of some fraction of whatever already addresses the requirement, than learn about how to use some existing tool that they don't already know.
One of my favorite examples is a company that home-rolled their own version of (a subset of) Kubernetes, ending up with a fabulously fragile monstrosity that none of the devs want to touch any more, and those who do quickly regret it.
How does BEAM renew my certificates, configure reverse-proxies, mount networked storage volumes to whichever node a given process is running on and handle cronjobs, disk pressure and secrets?
I sure hope it doesn't involve a bunch of shell scripts to create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden...
Nah Kubernetes is a systems level, language agnostic (at least doesn’t force you to run Golang workloads) variant of J2EE. It’s basically modern day Websphere
1. there's too much to learn and know, and the cs courseware and interviews are all about algorithmic complexity, rather than business setup and operations. same with "how do you raise money" vs "how do you make a great customer experience"
2. the market rewards building the new functionality, not building all the standard chunks required to run a business
if anthropic had great customer support built out, but no model and no claude-code, theyd be much worse than they are now having stuff people want but lacking the ability to serve it
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clearly theres still plenty of b2b startup opportunities standardizing how all these things work, so that business can focus on their actual business rather than recreating all the basics
There can be reasons for reinventing something, both good and bad. But I was more talking about the cases where people regiment something because they either didn't bother to do the slightest bit of research into what was already available, or because they didn't care and just wanted to do it themselves, inflicting their inevitably poor solution on everyone else.
They'd rather treat the general version of Greenspun's 10th rule as a commandment, and create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of some fraction of whatever already addresses the requirement, than learn about how to use some existing tool that they don't already know.
One of my favorite examples is a company that home-rolled their own version of (a subset of) Kubernetes, ending up with a fabulously fragile monstrosity that none of the devs want to touch any more, and those who do quickly regret it.