Isn’t this basically just saying “the way we’ve always done things here is optimal”? That is very rarely the case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds like a lot of folks here would not like to work with someone so set in their ways.
The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.
Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of hours of developer time... for no real competitive advantage.
It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point were something about Java annotations clicked and the report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but building big things that give small gains aren't viable in small shops.
Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.
The small company is best served by working on things that give the competitive advantage - not working on those big ideas (unless that big idea is the competitive advantage).
Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got thousands of developers some of whom have some free time or the competitive advantage is removing another 200 bytes from a web page.
That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript, and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS. There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of anyones time on something that can be solved off the shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an optimal use of time.
