Imagine you are the CTO of a fast-growing fintech startup. Your team has spent the last six months building a custom “Payment Gateway” from scratch. It’s a bit buggy, doesn’t handle international currencies well yet, and requires two dedicated engineers just to keep it running.
At a high-level board meeting, the CEO proposes purchasing a world-class, battle-tested IP (Intellectual Property) from a major competitor that is liquidating. This IP is legendary: it’s 10x faster, supports every currency on earth, and is compliant with all global regulations. Buying it would let your team focus on the actual product features.
The Perplexing Situation: Your Lead Engineer—the one who wrote the original code—vehemently opposes the purchase. In a heated meeting, he throws his hands up and says:
“Their codebase is ‘messy.’ It doesn’t follow our specific naming conventions! Plus, I just optimized our database query last night—we’re practically there. Why would we buy a ‘black box’ when we have our own high-performance engine right here?”
The rest of the team nods in agreement. They choose to spend another year (and another million dollars) fixing their own wobbly system rather than using the world-class one available for a fraction of the cost.
What do you think happened here?
- Are they just being protective of their jobs?
- Is “naming conventions” really a dealbreaker for a billion-dollar company?
- Or is their “sweat equity” blinding them to objective quality?
Find the answer here.
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