The IKEA Effect in Software: When Labor Leads to Love (and Technical Debt)

You’ve just finished a weekend-long refactor of a legacy service. The code is dense, the abstractions are bespoke, and you are the only one who truly understands how the data flows through the three different caching layers you implemented. You look at it with a sense of profound pride. It’s yours.

Then, a teammate looks at the PR and asks: "Why didn't we just use a standard library for this?"

Your immediate reaction isn't logical; it's defensive. You start explaining the "nuances" of your implementation, but deep down, you aren't defending the code's efficiency—you are defending your labor.

This is the IKEA Effect in software development, and it is one of the most dangerous psychological traps in engineering.

1. What is the IKEA Effect?

In 2011, researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely identified a cognitive bias where consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they have partially created or assembled themselves.

In their experiments, participants were willing to pay 63% more for IKEA furniture they built themselves compared to identical, pre-assembled versions. They didn't just like it more; they valued it as highly as if an expert had made it.

In software, this translates to a simple, destructive premise: Working on something makes you think it’s better than it actually is.

When you spend ten hours wrestling with a custom authentication logic, your brain "rewards" you by inflating the perceived quality of that logic. You stop seeing the bugs and only see the effort.

2. The "Not Invented Here" (NIH) Paradox

The most common manifestation of the IKEA Effect is the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. We’ve all seen teams reject perfectly good open-source libraries to build internal versions that are inevitably buggier, poorly documented, and harder to maintain.

Why do we do this?

Psychological Ownership: As I've discussed in Cognitive Load, every dependency is a cognitive tax. But our brains lie to us and say that our code is "free" because we already understand it. We perceive external code as "complex" and our own code as "clear," regardless of reality.
The Competence Loop: Building something from scratch triggers a sense of efficacy. We feel powerful when we solve a problem, even if that problem was already solved by someone else ten years ago.

This leads to the Architect's Ego, a theme I've touched on when discussing Over-engineering. We build for the "Aha!" moment of creation, rather than the "Quiet" moment of a working product.

3. The "Success Condition" Trap

One of the most fascinating findings in Norton’s research was that the IKEA Effect only occurs if the labor results in a successful completion. If the IKEA box falls apart, the love vanishes.

In software, this creates a dangerous survival bias. We only keep the bespoke systems that "worked" well enough to ship. These systems then become "sacred cows." We refuse to replace them because we remember the pain of birth.

We end up with "Legacy Love"—a deep emotional attachment to a messy, monolithic system simply because we were the ones who spent the late nights keeping it alive.

4. Labor vs. Value: The Maintenance Tax

The IKEA Effect makes us blind to the Maintenance Tax. When we value our own labor, we forget that every line of code we write is a liability.

In Minimalist Software, I argued that the best code is the code you don't write. But if you are suffering from the IKEA Effect, "not writing code" feels like "not creating value."

We need to shift our psychological reward system:

Low Value: Building a custom JSON parser for the sake of it.
High Value: Integrating a robust, standard parser in 30 seconds and spending the rest of the day solving the actual user problem.

5. Strategies for a Pragmatic Architecture

How do we fight a bias that is hard-wired into our need for competence?

The "Third-Party First" Rule: Before writing a single line of custom infrastructure, spend 30 minutes looking for an industry-standard solution. If you choose to build it anyway, you must justify it without using the words "simpler" or "faster."
Kill Your Darlings: Regularly audit your codebase for custom solutions that can now be replaced by standard tools. If you feel a "pang" of sadness about deleting that clever regex you wrote, that’s the IKEA Effect. Delete it anyway.
Promote "Curation" over "Creation": In your team, celebrate the developer who finds a way to remove custom code more than the one who writes it.
Embrace the Boring: As noted in The Lindy Effect, time-tested tools are usually better than your weekend experiment. Love the boring tools precisely because you didn't have to struggle to build them.

Conclusion: Love the Results, Not the Labor

Innovation is about solving new problems, not reinventing old solutions.

The IKEA Effect tells us that our labor makes our work special. Architecture, however, tells us that our work is special only if it solves a problem and survives the test of time.

The next time you feel a rush of pride for a complex, custom-built system, take a step back and ask: "Am I in love with the solution, or just the hours I spent on it?"

Build for the user. Build for the future. And for heaven's sake, stop building your own IKEA boxes when you could just buy the desk.

To understand how to keep your systems lean and your mind clear, read about Minimalist Software and Cognitive Load Theory.