Most IT Engineers Say Build over Buy—But I 100% Disagree. Here’s Why
Hi. I'm Max Clark. Conversation I get to have a lot is related to buy versus build. If you ask an engineer, should we buy this platform or should we build this platform? Or if they have the option of thinking about it in the context of like buy versus build almost exclusively, that engineer is gonna tell you we should build it.
Speaker 1:Why? Because we're gonna build it just to our specs. We're gonna be able to build it at our timeline. We're not gonna spend monthly to do it. Like, we're gonna control it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be able to maintain it. You know, engineers love to build just out of the get go. Engineers love to build. I'm an engineer. I love to build.
Speaker 1:That's what we do. It's what you want to do right but should you build you know a tangent to this buy versus build you hear you know discuss a lot is tech debt and the common example of tech debt really is like oh we've got all this old code that we have to go through and we have to refactor we have to change and so therefore we have all this tech debt in our code base. That's a perfectly fine thing way of thinking about tech debt. But instead, I want you to think about tech debt in terms of, like, a depreciating asset the same way you would think about, like, a structure, a building. You know, if you have a house, that house has a roof, that roof is gonna last you 30 years.
Speaker 1:Now something could happen and that roof could only last you 5 years and you have to replace it but on average that roof is going to have to be replaced in 30 years the structure you know the house has to be painted it has to be repaired you need to have caulking done you're gonna have this right you have a certain amount of maintenance that needs to take place in that house now I say all this because what tech debt really is is it's the decision about whose balance sheet do you want to have that depreciation on do you want that depreciation on your balance sheet or do you want it on somebody else's balance sheet do you want to be fixing it do you want somebody else to be fixing it do you want to be improving it do you want somebody else to be improving it do you want to be investing resources to deal with it or do you want somebody else to be doing it right so David Perrell reposted a photo recently we're gonna make sure it gets included here and it's a great framework for thinking about this I'm gonna simplify my explanation for this into if it is something that is driving revenue for you like directly your product or service chances are you're going to want to build right because this is your business if it is something that you use to drive revenue but not what actually is your revenue you're probably gonna want to buy okay You know that there's a scale.
Speaker 1:Right? Like these things, this is generic advice. Right? There's scales of these things. Is it more efficient for you to use somebody else's ad platform versus building your own ad platform from scratch in order to manage your ad placement on, you know, meta and Google and yada yada yada.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, you know, maybe you're at the scale where it does make sense because you're placing, you know, $1,000,000,000 a year worth of ad ad buy. But chances are it doesn't. And you should just use somebody else's and pay for it. Maybe it's expensive and maybe it's not.
Speaker 1:The explanation that was posted here I'm gonna summarize it's so good it's everything your business is doing needs to be constantly improving otherwise it's falling behind okay you're moving forward there's no static it's either moving forward or moving backwards Right. So your business needs to be moving forward, which means the tools and the components that are driving your business need to be moving forward. Who is going to move all of these things forward the fastest? Are you going to invest the resources to move your tooling in your infrastructure and your platforms forward or is a third party who is providing this service as their core revenue. So here's the key.
Speaker 1:Like, it's not what you're doing to drive revenue. It's what they're doing to drive revenue. So as soon as that shift gets made, the investments have been made by that third party is going to shove this thing forward faster. And this is and by the way, now they have to maintain it. They have to improve it.
Speaker 1:They have to repair it. They have to. It's on their balance sheet. It's not on your balance sheet. You're not maintaining it.
Speaker 1:What happens to companies when they go through build cycles and when you have an engineer that decides to go through a build cycle is at some point you realize, like, I don't wanna invest resources in this. I don't wanna have 6 engineers maintaining this platform. They need to do other things that are important to us to generate revenue. So what do you do? You take them off the project.
Speaker 1:Then now you have 2 engineers working on this critical system and you have 1 engineer working the critical system and then you have half an engineer working on this critical system and then you have no engineers working on this critical system and then you have raw. Right. And then you have stasis stagnation which is actually just decline right. So the point with all this is is that is the point around buy versus build is absolutely your great smart engineers can always go and build 1 100 percent like they want to go build That's fun. Let's build a billing platform.
Speaker 1:Let's build a CRM. Let's build a communications platform. Let's build a blah blah blah blah system. Like whatever it is. Like, absolutely.
Speaker 1:They're gonna come back and they're gonna say, let's build it. We can build it. Let's build it. Yeah we're gonna build it do you want them building it no probably you don't probably you want your engineering resources which are finite there are limited resources doing things for you that actually service your customer and generate revenue for you if you can go out and buy it from somebody else who's in the business of building that tool to generate revenue that's probably where you want to be and why you should be doing it now yes it depends there's caveats there always are but as a generic advice at a high level without getting into details if you have the option between buy and build you're probably better off just going out and buying it and the reminder I make all the time because there are certain tools that we use in our stack for our business that I hate writing the check for or seen on the credit card statement every month and I know like oh we can just go out and build this ourselves but the point is it's not worth it just go out and buy it and be happy I'm Max Clark I hope this helps you I'd love to hear your comments below did you build it And what happened?
Speaker 1:Did you build it? Is it working for you? Did you decide to replace it and outsource it later? Let me know. Comment below.
Speaker 1:Love to hear it. Feel it.
