> Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them.

1000%. In my experience this isn't even a "sometimes". It's the opposite. Explaining/arguing in the abstract why a significant directional change is needed has little persuasive power. If you can demo something, you actually have a fighting chance, even if it barely works. It can be a working product, it can be charts, it can be a semi-functional mockup, whatever, but you have to show _something_ that isn't just talking about it. I learned this the hard way after advocating for things and getting shot down too many times.

> Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not.

Couldn't agree more with this, also. I've seen an astonishing number of homemade job runner systems, homemade message queues, homemade databases, homemade web frameworks, homemade languages, etc.

One can make the argument that this is how technical progress happens, and in some sense, that's true (we wouldn't have a lot of nice things if this never happened), but it's rare. Like, really rare. Most shops would be better served with e.g. Django, Postgres, and HTML, deployed on Heroku (or your Heroku-equivalent of choice) rather than spending hundreds of human-months building "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of $COMMON_OFF_THE_SHELF_TECHNOLOGY".

So, I completely agree with you.