I naïvely assumed that avoiding being paged was motivation enough, but experience has disabused me of that notion. Time after time, “we’ll fix one more thing on our hacky, bespoke bullshit” has won out over “we will use boring, pre-existing solutions.” My favorite example was a team who built a load balancer / health checker for Postgres in NodeJS. Despite causing roughly one incident per month, I was never able to convince anyone that they should abandon their special baby.

I honestly don’t understand how it’s even helpful to put shit like that on your résumé. If I read that in an interview, my immediate question would be “why did you build this instead of using HAProxy / AWS NLB / etc.?”