Yep. Making a new thing is how you get promoted. Maintaining or improving an old thing is nearly useless, even at companies with competent managers.
This is the same reason why a lot of companies have awful security practices. From the managers’ perspectives, they’re burning valuable engineer time on something that doesn’t produce any tangible benefits besides reducing the possibility of a lawsuit. And that lawsuit is probably cheaper to just pay up, rather than pay for all that engineer effort.
Plenty of people are benefiting you just don’t see it because it’s internal.
The incentives are such that new thing is better and looks better on your year end goals.
Plus when an org gets large enough and siloed enough the left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing.
Yep. Making a new thing is how you get promoted. Maintaining or improving an old thing is nearly useless, even at companies with competent managers.
This is the same reason why a lot of companies have awful security practices. From the managers’ perspectives, they’re burning valuable engineer time on something that doesn’t produce any tangible benefits besides reducing the possibility of a lawsuit. And that lawsuit is probably cheaper to just pay up, rather than pay for all that engineer effort.