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2025-04-18

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Industry Standards

The Worst Reason

When I take a position at a new company, I take the first week to soak up as much information about the business as possible. I don't expect to understand everything, but if I make peace with the stress of being overwhelmed with data, I can start drawing connections between data points and building a more complete picture of what I'm getting into. An important part of understanding how the data points connect is knowing the reasons for their existence. So when a coworker is explaining a part of the business to me, I ask why the tool or process is in place if it's not immediately apparent. Unfortunately, all too often, the reason is, "Oh, it's the industry standard."

If you work in the industry you already know the standards: React, Jira, Agile, Scrum, AWS, etc. It is not always a bad idea to use these tools; that is not the point that I want to make here. There are already plenty of discussions about the pros and cons of each of these examples. Instead, I want to look at the idea of "Industry Standard" as a reason for adopting a tool or process in a business.

Everyone Else Is Doing It

The term "Industry Standard" essentially means "What other companies in a given industry are doing". It doesn't mean that the standard is good or bad, it's simply the standard. The problem is that because everyone else is doing it, it seems like an easy answer to what you should do. Like my parents used to say, "If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?"

A great example of this is the software engineer interview process. Google wanted the best and brightest programmers working at their company, so they vetted their applicants with extremely difficult technical interviews and paid their new hires extremely well. Then Google became an industry leader, and other tech companies (and a lot of non-tech companies) saw their success and tried to copy them. Most of these companies didn't have the capital to match Google's salaries, but they could easily increase the difficulty of their interview process with arbitrary "leetcode" problems that applicants ended up memorizing the solutions to. It worked for Google, so it became the Industry Standard, and now we end up wasting the time of both applicants and companies with a process that doesn't justify its existence anymore.

Another example would be microservice architecture. Huge tech companies needed a way to organize their thousands of software engineers, so they split up their product(s) into hundreds of services so that each team of developers could work on a single part of the company without having to coordinate as much with all the other teams. Other, smaller companies noticed this, and decided to do the same thing with their double digit engineer headcount, without realizing they were sacrificing application performance for productivity gains that only show up at a much larger scale. If you ever found yourself single-handedly running multiple microservices, you've been a victim of this mindset.

The point is that while it's not necessarily a bad idea to use something that is an Industry Standard, it is vital to understand why it works for the companies that use it, and whether your business fits into that context.

Good Reasons

Here are some good reasons for a business to use something:

  • A lot of people already use the tool, so we'll have an easy time hiring.
  • Its creators are dedicated to supporting it far into the future.
  • It has extensive documentation and non-standard use cases are all worked out.
  • There's a large aftermarket of parts or plugins to do a lot of the work for us.

These are all possible benefits of industry standards as well, and I think this is why people automatically assume they're a good thing. This is clearly not always the case. There is not an intrinsic cause-and-effect relationship for something being standardized and it having these benefits.

When people say that an industry is "stagnating", they usually mean that the companies in the industry are not innovating. Oftentimes, however what people see as innovation is just shedding the pressure of outdated and irrelevant standards in order to bring value to customers as efficiently as they can. Maybe it's time to take a hard look at the tools and processes your business is using, and ask yourself if they are there for another reason than just being an Industry Standard.