You're not wrong. The fundamental issue wasn't in-house vs third party libraries.
The developers around me tend to be inept at time estimation. They completely lack that aptitude. To be fair, so do I. I slap a 5x multiplier onto my worst case estimates for feature work... and I'm proud to end up with a good average estimate, because I'm still doing better than many of my coworkers at that point. Thank goodness we're employed for our programming skills, not our time estimation ones, or we'd all be unemployable.
They think "this will only take a day". If I'm lucky, they're wrong, and they'll spend a week on it. If I'm unlucky, they're right, and they'll spend a day on it - unlucky because that comes with at least a week's worth of technical debt, bugs, and other QC issues to fix at some point. In a high time pressure environment - too many things to do, too little time to do it all in even when you're optimistic - and it's understandable that the latter is frequently chosen. It may even be the right choice in the short term. But this only reinforces poor time estimation skills.
The end result? They vastly underestimate the cost of supporting the extra code they'll write. They make the "right" choice based on their understanding of the tradeoffs, and roll their own library instead of using a 3rd party solution. But as we've just established their understanding was vastly off basis. Something must give as a result, no matter how good a programmer they are otherwise: schedule, or quality. Or both.
The developers around me tend to be inept at time estimation. They completely lack that aptitude. To be fair, so do I. I slap a 5x multiplier onto my worst case estimates for feature work... and I'm proud to end up with a good average estimate, because I'm still doing better than many of my coworkers at that point. Thank goodness we're employed for our programming skills, not our time estimation ones, or we'd all be unemployable.
They think "this will only take a day". If I'm lucky, they're wrong, and they'll spend a week on it. If I'm unlucky, they're right, and they'll spend a day on it - unlucky because that comes with at least a week's worth of technical debt, bugs, and other QC issues to fix at some point. In a high time pressure environment - too many things to do, too little time to do it all in even when you're optimistic - and it's understandable that the latter is frequently chosen. It may even be the right choice in the short term. But this only reinforces poor time estimation skills.
The end result? They vastly underestimate the cost of supporting the extra code they'll write. They make the "right" choice based on their understanding of the tradeoffs, and roll their own library instead of using a 3rd party solution. But as we've just established their understanding was vastly off basis. Something must give as a result, no matter how good a programmer they are otherwise: schedule, or quality. Or both.