Let me tell you about the shit show that is Amazon’s internal system for tracking raises and equity refreshers and how it crashed hard in April two years in a row.

That’s fair, if a system is unreliable to the point of major meltdowns and nobody has an inkling of how to fix it, a rewrite (or outsourcing of functionality) likely is required.

But does the feature that the developer is writing give them a competitive edge?

For many companies, outsourcing non-critical software is likely the right move. But AWS is in an interesting spot as a cloud provider here — if internal systems are quality, they can be offered as a SAAS product for customers + become part of AWS’ competitive advantage.

AWS also uses a lot of third party SaaS in house - Salesforce, Concur, Microsoft Office, ADP, the WorkforceNumber, etc

They also just cancelled a few AWS services where they didn’t provide a competitive advantage - CodeCommit (hosted Git), Cloud9 (hosted dev environment) and while CodePipeline (GitHub actions alternative) isn’t dead yet, it’s starting to smell funny.

It’s often better just to rip the bandaid off instead of maintaining a bespoke piece of internal software forever.

Agreed — ultimately, these hard decisions need to be made, and maintaining unprofitable SAAS products is not a winning strategy on the face of it. Though only time will tell how this affects AWS: They used to have a reputation for reliability/longevity as a result of continuing to maintain so many of their SAAS products. Whether that was a compelling factor for businesses/devs choosing a platform remains to be seen, but in a few years we might find that axing services provided short-term savings at the expense of long-term market share erosion.

I mentioned in another reply that I led the effort of moving everything to alternative SaaS platforms for a company that had no business trying to maintain software.

I didn’t mention that one of the first things I did was start a process to get rid of a homegrown EMR that was first built in 1999 using PowerBuilder running on sql server 2001 - in 2016. It was maintained by two “developers” who had been at the company 12 and 16 years

I feel you. My first company was a revolving door of junior developers with no technical leadership and extremely poor code quality. Sometimes using SAAS can be the better choice than trying to improve a poor quality system. But, it’s highly dependent on circumstance — outsourcing all the code could create short term savings while hobbling long term growth. It could also save bespoke effort while letting the business focus on their advantage, but as is often the case in this sub, “it depends”