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Discussion on: The ONE chart every developer MUST understand

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Blaine Osepchuk • Edited

The people in our industry are prone to adopting the new, trendy thing for all the wrong reasons. And I'm not taking just about frameworks. It also includes languages, methodologies, libraries, tools, management fads, and more. If it's new and it's got buzz we're trying it in production systems regardless of what our stakeholders think. Read You Should Build your Next App on a Boring Stack for more details.

If the stakeholders in most projects considering a new technology were consulted in a meaningful way most of them wouldn't want the risk of new and shiny. Most projects need risk reduction and schedule predictability more than they need innovation in their stack.

As a manager, I've shot down many proposals like this. The devs don't like it but I tell them that we are here to make money and meet management objectives and that they should experiment with any technology they want on their personal time.

I'm not saying that we never do anything new but my default answer of "no" to the shiny and new thing keeps us from changing without a good reason.

I think you've brought up another important dimension here. The engineers building a chemical processing plant have an expected lifetime in mind that's likely several decades. They are being paid to make sure the plant is maintainable for it's entire anticipated operating life. I've rarely met a software developer that even considers that.

On one project I worked on we had an explicit expected lifetime of 15-20 years. So every time we looked at adding a new library or tool we considered the probability that it would still be around in 20 years and what we would have to do if it wasn't. That consideration radically changed our decision making process--we became much more conservative.