> It's also an environment that encourages reinvention of the wheel, especially ... | Hacker News

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otterley on Aug 28, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup

> It's also an environment that encourages reinvention of the wheel, especially by younger engineers with little supervision that don't necessarily realize that a particular wheel already exists and is ready to use.

Even big companies do this with alarming frequency. The best example I can think of is Google reinventing XDR (which was codified in an RFC!) via Protocol Buffers.

jeremyjh on Aug 28, 2014 | [–]

XDR has no support for versioning. This is probably the most important features distinguishing PB.

otterley on Aug 29, 2014 | | [–]

I can't find any details about Protocol Buffers supporting versioning. Can you point me in the right direction?

raverbashing on Aug 28, 2014 | [–]

Or they try to reinvent a plane (with all the complexity) where you only need a bicycle.

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