This is an interesting question. Some thoughts in no particular order: I think a lot of engineers, are, by nature, curious to learn, try new things and experim

This is an interesting question. Some thoughts in no particular order: I think a lot of engineers, are, by nature, curious to learn, try new things and experiment. If you're doing the same thing over and over, it's not making that part of your brain happy. You can do new and interesting things with "boring technology". Sometimes, the new thing is worthwhile. I remember when Rails was new. I'm glad I picked it up, and still think it's a very, very solid way of getting things done in a way that's both rapid, and yet generally well organized and with a propensity for testing and a culture of writing good code. At the time, there was a lot of PHP, which was quick... but often a mess. There were Java frameworks, but they were big and heavy and clunky. At this point, both those languages have benefited from some of the ideas in Rails. It's important to try and figure out what the "sweet spot" is for the new tech if you want to use it. As someone who has used Erlang for a long time, including professionally, I've been curious about doing some work with Elixir, but there are definitely places out there who employed it because "new", it seems, without solid reasons why. I'm still not 100% sure what the sweet spot is for Elixir, although I was very happy with Erlang for the "semi-embedded" systems where I used it. I think going for one or two new things, while keeping the rest mostly the same is a decent way of containing the risk. I've been using Postgres for 20+ years, quite happily. I enjoy the challenge of writing solid, performant queries with it, but it's the same DB system.