> From your experiences, tell me more! How could this problem be avoided? How does one sniff out such glut?
To a certain extent:
Create a corporate culture where people can get work done without needing to be "protected" from the rest of the company around them
Select against empire-building folks.
Push a culture of reusing and improving existing tools whenever possible.
Recognize and reward people for avoiding and eliminating technical debt, not just for building new things. What you recognize and laud, you will get more of. (There's a balance here: you need both kinds of people.) Hire more collaborators and less "ninjas".
If you have enough budget, empower people to experiment with interesting things without having to hide those folks under a corporate-level justification smokescreen. Understand that some explorations and experimentation will not pay off, and support that anyway, so people don't feel like they have to hide things until they're successful.
Encourage people to report organizational issues and organizational friction, and fix it as early as possible, so that people don't have to create "shadow infrastructure" to get their job done.
Personally, I think this problem is inevitable as organization scales. So, if you don't want to fall into that, remedy is simple: don't scale. As in, you can scale in terms of revenue and user amount, but avoid reinvesting it into hiring more and more people. (Classic examples of companies that achieved that, at least to some extent and at a certain moment, are Instagram and Whatsapp, but there are many more less famous ones).
I guess, when you're on the rocket part of the hockey stick it seems that you can solve anything by hiring more people. A lot of leaders kind of forget what they sacrifice when they do that.
If someone comes to you and says "we need to hire more people to do my job so I can move into a leadership role" say "sure, if you take a pay cut," or "no"
If you are making a lot of money and one of your employees has performed well, and never asked you to hire more people to do their job, give them a God damn raise
