The senior developer above me is like this for me, and it’s rough because it shakes my self esteem AND often leads to me having to support and extend a fragile and changing 3rd party library to solve a rather specific problem that would be better solved with custom code.

Where it really stings is when I do something of my own initiative (like, for example, create a transparent API over memoizing and caching some expensive calculation, or refactor some of our common client customizations into their own set of classes so it’s easier to extend) and he ignores it or scoffs at it.

Only to then find a third party library that implements something similarly. THEN it’s presented to me as a “brilliant idea” that we can take advantage of.

At that point, when I say “we” already do this, he usually rephrases what his brilliant 3rd party library does, as though he can’t fathom that I would be capable of doing something like that myself, and clearly I’m just not understanding what he’s telling me.

I think it’s a defensive mechanism for his ego against one of his peers or employees being more capable than he is.

But it’s also not like he can’t learn this stuff himself, he just doesn’t ever put in the time or effort.

With many exceptions (the left-pad debacle comes to mind), it’s generally much better to use a third party library instead of supporting your own implementation.

I know this is the mantra, but my experience has been highly mixed and only generalizable to how low in the stack it sits.

For, say, security implementations for authorization and access controls, or even low level HTTP request routing? Absolutely. The goal there is to adhere to something standard and battle tested by experts, and the third party libraries tend to be fewer in number, and of higher quality, with longer term support and clearly defined upgrade paths.

But that’s the lower level stuff, where your special custom needs are superseded by the primary goal of just “doing the one right thing”, or “adhere to the commonly agreed upon standard”.

For all the other things that make an app unique - things like CSS frameworks, UI components (beyond basic, accessibility-minded building blocks), chart drawing, report generation and caching - my experience has taught me otherwise, the hard way.

Being stuck using a 3rd party library that doesn’t do what the client or business needs it to do, having to juggle our own internal patches and bug fixes with updates to the library itself, all only to have the library abandoned or deprecated in favor of the author’s next pet project, really sucks and often comes with a high opportunity cost and a high development cost.

I now consider third party implementations of higher level features (and especially anything front-end) to be something that needs to be evaluated as equally costly as an internal implementation by default, and not favored just because somebody else wrote it.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my experience, though. I also suspect ecosystem makes a difference. The PHP and JS ecosystems are full of poor libraries with snake oil sales pitches. I suspect this is different with, say, Rust.

I think we mostly agree with each other. As I said, there’s many exceptions.

I’ve mostly worked with Python and JVM languages, which probably explains why I’m less passionate about the counter-argument than you are. Ecosystem definitely matters a lot. VanillaJS is the only good JS framework IMO.