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I used to wonder why there's always a constant flood of new new technologies, frameworks, products, etc. instead of improvements over existing solutions. Now I

I used to wonder why there's always a constant flood of new new technologies, frameworks, products, etc. instead of improvements over existing solutions. Now I believe I know why; it's about growth for the business, at all levels. New technology may give the business a competitive edge but more importantly it will give the developers who created it as well as those who learn it, a career boast. This is why we get things like software updates for a UI that no one asked for. In the end, the core idea is that "good enough" is never enough. Because improvements, not maintenance, drive careers forward.

Judgmentality 6y ago
Sometimes. More often than not though, I suspect it stems from ignorance, hubris, and incompetence (and sometimes all of the above). Basically people that don't know better, but think they know better, try to reinvent the wheel. https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- cle 6y ago
  Sometimes too. I think a big factor also is coordination costs. Working with a bunch of engineers outside of your company, with different goals and visions, is very time consuming. For companies who need to build-or-die, spending a bunch of time and money building relationships with people who are just as likely to act as roadblocks and gatekeepers just isn't an attractive proposition. In this case it's not about new technology per se, but about new control and new ownership, which is an excellent way to reduce coordination costs.
- solveit 6y ago
  It's also one hell of a lot easier to reinvent a shitty wheel than it is to learn a good one. Add that to the phenomenon of temporary hacks becoming permanent nine times out of ten...
justicezyx 6y ago
> improvements, not maintenance, drive careers forward. Google puts a piece of software on death roll by declaring them “in maintenance mode”, that's the state where no matter how difficult it was to work with, and how valuable are the improvements made to the software, the results carries “negative” weight in perf review. That is, one who devote considerable time on a software in maintenance mode is considered working in conflict with the norm, and should be taught to behave more correctly, and sometimes punished for consistent effort of not reverting that behavior.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  Why doesn't Google open-source the projects it has killed? Hubris.
  - hazz99 6y ago
    Because they’re largely dependent on internal, non-public infrastructure and libraries. Open sourcing things is nonzero effort.
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    They cannot be killed easily. They also cannot be easily open-sourced as answered below. They were put on death roll. In the sense, that people with authority deemed them rightly deserved to be killed. But any software that needs authority to be declared dead, certainly have a life of their own. One such case is when the practitioners see the software has great value and an inherent vitality to sustain itself, but were simply rejected by people with authority. Did you know that Borg itself were put on death roll once, by Google's most powerful technical authority? That history ruined my respect for many of the once-golden images. But in the end a great lesson that anything that is valuable, is also worth fighting for. Just an example of how ridiculous an authority could become, if allowed to be unchallenged. Even in technical sphere, where is thought to be more rationale.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Maybe. I think it’s less about career growth — though I’m sure that’s the goal for some — and more about the reality that it’s often more fun to build something new, rather than contributing or adding-on to something that already exists. A new framework is shiny and exciting. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rehash of something that already exists, with a few minor changes or some differences in approach, it's new and there is a sense of excitement around building something new that just isn’t there when you’re contributing to something that already exists. Part of the reason stuff like NIH (not invented here) is so common isn’t just because of the belief, true or not, that an in-house solution will be preferable, but because augmenting and improving and refining something that already exists is hard. But the point of the essay, as I read it, is actually making a very different argument. It’s not talking about how frequently the same concepts are reinvented or remixed, but about how when there are genuine breakthroughs in technology (however you want to define it), the initial impulse is to use those breakthroughs to solve the same problems as whatever existed in the past. But doing that, while pragmatic in the beginning, can distract from what makes a that new innovation so innovative.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
>software updates for a UI that no one asked for. No one ever asks for these things even if they are needed. People complain at every single youtube redesign but when you look back at the past designs they look ugly compared to the current design.
- userbinator 6y ago
  "look ugly" is absolutely trivial (and subjective) in comparison to the loss of functionality and efficiency that these horrible redesigns have caused.
  - hazz99 6y ago
    “Functionality and efficiency” is not always important. I don’t want YouTube to be maximally efficient, I want it to be an easy-to-understand and pleasurable watching/searching/browsing experience.

Judgmentality 6y ago

Sometimes. More often than not though, I suspect it stems from ignorance, hubris, and incompetence (and sometimes all of the above). Basically people that don't know better, but think they know better, try to reinvent the wheel. https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/

cle 6y ago
Sometimes too. I think a big factor also is coordination costs. Working with a bunch of engineers outside of your company, with different goals and visions, is very time consuming. For companies who need to build-or-die, spending a bunch of time and money building relationships with people who are just as likely to act as roadblocks and gatekeepers just isn't an attractive proposition. In this case it's not about new technology per se, but about new control and new ownership, which is an excellent way to reduce coordination costs.
solveit 6y ago
It's also one hell of a lot easier to reinvent a shitty wheel than it is to learn a good one. Add that to the phenomenon of temporary hacks becoming permanent nine times out of ten...

justicezyx 6y ago

> improvements, not maintenance, drive careers forward. Google puts a piece of software on death roll by declaring them “in maintenance mode”, that's the state where no matter how difficult it was to work with, and how valuable are the improvements made to the software, the results carries “negative” weight in perf review. That is, one who devote considerable time on a software in maintenance mode is considered working in conflict with the norm, and should be taught to behave more correctly, and sometimes punished for consistent effort of not reverting that behavior.

vagrantJin 6y ago
Why doesn't Google open-source the projects it has killed? Hubris.
- hazz99 6y ago
  Because they’re largely dependent on internal, non-public infrastructure and libraries. Open sourcing things is nonzero effort.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  They cannot be killed easily. They also cannot be easily open-sourced as answered below. They were put on death roll. In the sense, that people with authority deemed them rightly deserved to be killed. But any software that needs authority to be declared dead, certainly have a life of their own. One such case is when the practitioners see the software has great value and an inherent vitality to sustain itself, but were simply rejected by people with authority. Did you know that Borg itself were put on death roll once, by Google's most powerful technical authority? That history ruined my respect for many of the once-golden images. But in the end a great lesson that anything that is valuable, is also worth fighting for. Just an example of how ridiculous an authority could become, if allowed to be unchallenged. Even in technical sphere, where is thought to be more rationale.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

Maybe. I think it’s less about career growth — though I’m sure that’s the goal for some — and more about the reality that it’s often more fun to build something new, rather than contributing or adding-on to something that already exists. A new framework is shiny and exciting. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rehash of something that already exists, with a few minor changes or some differences in approach, it's new and there is a sense of excitement around building something new that just isn’t there when you’re contributing to something that already exists. Part of the reason stuff like NIH (not invented here) is so common isn’t just because of the belief, true or not, that an in-house solution will be preferable, but because augmenting and improving and refining something that already exists is hard. But the point of the essay, as I read it, is actually making a very different argument. It’s not talking about how frequently the same concepts are reinvented or remixed, but about how when there are genuine breakthroughs in technology (however you want to define it), the initial impulse is to use those breakthroughs to solve the same problems as whatever existed in the past. But doing that, while pragmatic in the beginning, can distract from what makes a that new innovation so innovative.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

>software updates for a UI that no one asked for. No one ever asks for these things even if they are needed. People complain at every single youtube redesign but when you look back at the past designs they look ugly compared to the current design.

userbinator 6y ago
"look ugly" is absolutely trivial (and subjective) in comparison to the loss of functionality and efficiency that these horrible redesigns have caused.
- hazz99 6y ago
  “Functionality and efficiency” is not always important. I don’t want YouTube to be maximally efficient, I want it to be an easy-to-understand and pleasurable watching/searching/browsing experience.