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I've sort of been dealing with this at my day job, except it doesn't come from other developers, it comes from management. Every few years, a new Head of Engin

I've sort of been dealing with this at my day job, except it doesn't come from other developers, it comes from management. Every few years, a new Head of Engineering comes in and says something like "let's use $TECHNOLOGY for this project" with the expectation that it will make the company more effective, I think. It's been GraphQL, microservices, clouds ("can we do this with Lambdas on AWS?" when we don't have any other significant infrastructure on AWS), and a bunch of other things. On one hand, it's good for me to dabble in a lot of this stuff (learning the basics of GraphQL on company time helps my resume, after all), but I end up pushing back most of the time ("I don't think this is a great use-case for GraphQL. From what I understand, $X and $Y would be reasons to use it, but for this project, REST makes more sense because of $Z"). Meanwhile I'm just trying to get my work done and not make it a hassle. If we had a good reason to use GraphQL (or any of the other things management suggests), I'd be into it, but I don't want to be wrestling with fitting square pegs into round holes for no benefit.

mywittyname 5y ago
This manager might be optimizing for the environment they work in. If the expectations are the Head of Engineering introduces Cool New Technology to the company, then that's what they will push to do. If you report directly to them, it might be worth a conversation to frame your team's work in a way that sells it as Cool New Technology that is being built.
- what_is_orcas 5y ago
  Oh certainly. I have a pretty good relationship with that manager, actually, and that's more or less the framework we use to sort of compromise. He gets his buzzwords and I get to get my work done. I enjoy learning new things, don't get me wrong, but sometimes a CRUD app is just a CRUD app and trying to shoehorn other stuff into it makes it more of a pain in the long run. I guess I just wanted to illustrate that this isn't only an IC issue; management can engage in MDD too.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
One thing to consider is that $TECHNOLOGY may not be picked or presented for its technical or performance benefits, but purely for hiring. And marketing, because hiring nowadays is 90% marketing, and in that most of it is down to "you'll get to use this cool technology". A LOT of job adverts in the past years that I looked at had "blockchain" and "IoT" sprinkled in, not because they did anything with it, but because a lot of developers wanted to do something with those. Because "Java, Postgres, React" don't excite anyone anymore.

mywittyname 5y ago

This manager might be optimizing for the environment they work in. If the expectations are the Head of Engineering introduces Cool New Technology to the company, then that's what they will push to do. If you report directly to them, it might be worth a conversation to frame your team's work in a way that sells it as Cool New Technology that is being built.

what_is_orcas 5y ago
Oh certainly. I have a pretty good relationship with that manager, actually, and that's more or less the framework we use to sort of compromise. He gets his buzzwords and I get to get my work done. I enjoy learning new things, don't get me wrong, but sometimes a CRUD app is just a CRUD app and trying to shoehorn other stuff into it makes it more of a pain in the long run. I guess I just wanted to illustrate that this isn't only an IC issue; management can engage in MDD too.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

One thing to consider is that $TECHNOLOGY may not be picked or presented for its technical or performance benefits, but purely for hiring. And marketing, because hiring nowadays is 90% marketing, and in that most of it is down to "you'll get to use this cool technology". A LOT of job adverts in the past years that I looked at had "blockchain" and "IoT" sprinkled in, not because they did anything with it, but because a lot of developers wanted to do something with those. Because "Java, Postgres, React" don't excite anyone anymore.