Well, the "due consideration" needs to duly consider the actual costs and benefits of the off-the-shelf software, not make the kind of unsupported blanket claims about its obvious superiority, like you just did. Every off-the-shelf program has maintenance costs, flaws, and weak fitness for purpose. You just made a sweeping and italicized claim that all off-the-shelf software is both less risky and faster to develop than house-made software. That's a dangerous philosophy and probably isn't true for every organization and application.
> …not make the kind of unsupported blanket claims about its obvious superiority, like you just did…
Not what I said. Let’s move on.
> That's a dangerous philosophy…
Go pick a fight with someone else.
My take on it is that the engineers want to make complicated solutions to hard problems to justify their salaries and get promoted, and that managers encourage that behavior so they can defend their headcount. I’m not accusing any of these people of acting in bad faith here—nobody’s reinventing tech to sabotage the company, it’s just that the system encourages this kind of behavior.
This problem is not unique to Uber, you’ll see similar things happen across the industry to different degrees.