not invented here
expressionops cultureprogramming
Stands for: Not Invented Here
The bias toward building something yourself rather than adopting a perfectly good external solution.
NIH shows up as distrust of outside libraries, standards, or vendors, sometimes justified by control and sometimes just ego or unfamiliarity. It is the counterweight to reuse: occasionally the right call for a core competency, but often expensive reinvention of a solved problem.
Not invented here is the tendency to reject external solutions in favour of building your own, and the honest version acknowledges that it is sometimes correct. The reflex earns its bad name when the rebuild is driven by pride, unfamiliarity, or an engineer's understandable preference for the interesting problem over the boring integration.
The costs of building are systematically underestimated because they arrive later and elsewhere. The initial version is often genuinely quick, and then someone maintains it for a decade: the edge cases the external library already handles, the security fixes it ships automatically, the documentation new hires would have found online. You are not choosing between building and buying, you are choosing who maintains it forever.
The opposite failure exists and deserves equal weight. Depending on an external component for something central to your business means accepting their roadmap, their abandonment risk, and their security posture, and the ecosystem has repeatedly demonstrated what happens when a tiny dependency disappears or is compromised. The judgement is whether the thing is core to what you do: build what differentiates you, adopt what does not, and be honest about which is which.
Also known as: NIH, NIH syndrome