Honestly I think any company that exceeds a certain size could do with a full time team to investigate and solve NIH and duplication.

I mean Google reinvents chat every couple of years, and that's just the ones that come out in public <_<

Fundamentally I believe it’s a communication problem + a problem of “engineers gonna engineer” to launch the next Big Win™ for their team / resume.

If I were looking for an honest solution for the first part, I might start with a standardized way of classifying technical problems and solitons. Maybe then it would be possible to build a directory of sorts for existing solutions that could be referenced when the need for a solution arises anywhere within the company.

Typically platform teams like ours (.NET person here) gets to see what a wide variety of teams are doing or are trying to do. YARP was a case of that happening and it felt like a good opportunity to build something low level and extensible that could help other teams at Microsoft, the OSS community and could directly drive improvements into the .NET networking stack.

I did worked with MSFT for some time. Basically you can do your own stuff, until you need to go to production. And if you do all things right "per process" somebody will "glimps" into your architecture and maybe even code. And in most cases this particular individual has seen a lot and is in the position to identify patterns. TBH I quite enjoyed how their corp machinery is working in the cloud world.

> I'm really curious, does Microsoft have a crew of anthropologists

Quite literally, yes. Microsoft research has (or at least had) anthropologists on crew.

That's actually cool! I feel it's great they do some introspective work, no matter the company size.

Microsoft employees here. No actually. It's probably via word of mouth that they realized people are reinventing the wheel.

You know how barnacles attach to a whale, to clean it? Maybe you guys need to spin off a whale-cleaner startup =D [edit] I realized it's the fish that clean the barnacles off it. So maybe like that. Anyway I'm just saying that an organization that is carrying that much dead weight just on internal organization is probably desperate for some better method than word of mouth to identify stuff like that.