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

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.