I wonder how many confounding factors there are though. At one point when I had just joined a companyy, a colleague in the process of leaving told me very confi

I wonder how many confounding factors there are though. At one point when I had just joined a companyy, a colleague in the process of leaving told me very confidently "at our scale it is not possible to do X anymore". Obviously, we got X working the very next week. What if using language Y for X was a disaster because of poor programming skills or micromanagers? In my experience it is very rarely as clear cut as "Y does not have hardware acceleration support" and there is not really enough rigour in the software engineering process to really figure out where a failure came from.