Meanwhile, companies that burn most effort into "design systems" seem to be heavily B2C, and mostly concerned about getting their colors to pop, fonts to be fancy, and buttons to be rounded. (Or old ancients like IBM that are just so big that they probably are among the few exceptions to the rule and actually need a design system![1])

Not a great comparison.

[1]: Love me some slashed or dotted-0 fonts. Thank you IBM for popularizing that.

In any case, the market has your answers. So many people are doing their own design systems. Can all this effort be caused by merely arrogance? There ought to be something else reinforcing this behavior.

No, it's not arrogance driving people to do their own design system. But corporations engage in all sorts of dysfunctional (to the whole) rituals.

If it did, then we'd not see every company adopting this year's technobabble to get a stock price bump. How many companies this year are chasing LLMs and AI even when it has absolutely nothing to do with their core product? How about a few years ago when everyone was after ML? A few years before that when it was setting up blockchains?

Heck, how many of these layoffs going around are due to the fact that every time a company does it they get a stock price bump?

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine." - Benjamin Graham

The market does care, eventually. How many of those types of companies that you mentioned are now bankrupt or out of business?

It's not about reinventing the wheel out of ego. It's about "We have 150 dev teams and want to make sure there's a documented way that our company is aligned upon for building things like forms for our customers". How should the company consistently apply error states? What a11y affordances are we baking into our UI? Radix and shadcn provide much of that out of the box, are they doing it in such a way that complies with our internal controls?

Maybe for some managers it's about ego and ownership above all else. Yes, those teams probably should be using MUI, or a themed Radix, or something. But those managers are going to suck no matter what.

The issue with "make the framework" approach is what happened to our company. We had a team dedicated to maintaining blessed widgets that eventually got gutted as other priorities came up. So now the blessed framework is rotting on an old version of Angular with no path to upgrade.

Distributing things, making smaller dedicated UX libraries when needed, and documenting look and feel. Heck, maybe even get public facing UX sign off all work way better than having the one true company framework that gets abandoned.

Now, you might say "they shouldn't have abandoned it" but the fact is that long before the team was gutted they were spending an inordinate amount of time fixing and extending widgets and trying to add new widgets as UX needs came up. Often for 1 shot usages. Before the team was gutted they were already behind on the Angular version with a plan to update "maybe next year" as it was a fairly large hurdle.

We picked a common component library, and we themed it with our colors/typography.

Took us a week to package it all up and now all our developers can install and use it easily and everything is compliant on ui/ux

None of us can write most of this on our resumes, and we can’t just spend our way out of it.

What I really don’t understand is why people are so fixated on getting version 1 out the door. Like it’s the Mount Everest, and afterward it’s all easy sailing, or everyone lives happily ever after.

Anyone can ship a version one. It’s shipping a version 2 that’s hard. And it sounds like your coworkers, like quite a few I’ve encountered before, couldn’t ship a version 2. That takes pacing and stamina and reaping the rewards of having said “no” enough during version 1 to normalize it.

There are many circumstances in which a design system is at best a lateral move and at worst a huge distraction. My issue with GP sentiment is that many of the hardcore pragmatists here on this lovely discussion board have one or two bad experiences and throw the baby out with the bathwater entirely. I just wanted to be a voice on the other side of the aisle.

How many companies do you think have 10s or 100s of UI teams?

I bet more companies have 1 UI team, or 1 UI person, than have 10 UI teams.

I think too much time and money is wasted on frontend web development but I'm also happy the Web doesn't all look the same. More design, less JS I say :)

Not ego, it’s all about control. When libraries map to business requirements, great! But what happens when they don’t? Now there’s an external team you have to beg to consider your use case or go rogue … or just start from day 1 with control.

That's not the reason why anyone builds a design system. Companies need a design system so their own developers can build consistent UIs easily. If you've ever seen the output of a company that has lots of teams and no consistent way of building UIs you'd be horrified. Their products are a mess, and the UX is terrible because each app (or part of an app) works differently depending on which team built it. A design system is an attempt to solve that problem.

Most companies have no reason to release their design system to the public. When a company does that it's usually dev rel, or just plain marketing.

Never in the history of software has one lost a sale due to how the buttons of their product look like.

And I guarantee you that their internal library will be worse than popular options out there. The amount of time I've been in meetings where 10 smart, well-paid people from 10 different products in a company are endlessly discussing paddings on an input field... It's just a complete waste of time.

You want to have a single `TextInput` component, for example, that's used everywhere in you company and can be changed easily. Nothing is stopping you from wrapping an off the shelf component library or even the base text input from the OS or HTML.