Follow The Crowd

“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

An addendum to yesterday’s post on tools: while there’s a lot of value in allowing individual engineers to customize their development setups, that doesn’t extend to organizations. It’s a rare company that’s such a special snowflake that it should eschew the broader ecosystem and build its own homegrown tooling (even one as big as Amazon, with which I have firsthand experience). And it’s doubly bad if it mandates use of said tooling from on high.

It’s much easier to motivate folks to care for the tools of their trade when they can select them, including being able to bring what they’ve used in prior roles, and then know that any further customization they do currently will be applicable to their next role and can be taken with them when they leave.

Thinking that adoption and embrace of custom solutions will produce loyalty will do quite the opposite. The cost of supporting diverse individuality is worth paying.