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"Choose boring technologies" doesn't imply "... and then never change ever again even when it becomes obsolete and unsupported". That's where the first company

"Choose boring technologies" doesn't imply "... and then never change ever again even when it becomes obsolete and unsupported". That's where the first company went wrong. It means to choose technology components that are stable and boring (but still actively developed with a healthy community around them!). It also means to break this rule if and when that thing is important enough to your success that it makes sense to spend innovation points on it because it'll set you apart. But also recognizing that those instances are rare, and that's where good engineering judgment and leadership comes in.

atoav 4y ago
"Choose boring technologies" is one of those phrases that makes sense when it makes sense, unless it doesn't. I find the negative expression of the same idea much more fitting: "Don't choose technology purely out of exitement". In that negative version the word purely does the heavy lifting: If all you have as a reason to choose a thing is excitement it might be a bad choice unless you can afford a failed attempt. In reality very often the "more exciting" choice will also come with their own additional pros/cons. It might be that your exciting Rust-Webservice has a smaller community backing its components, but maybe the APIs of the few components you really interact with is such a joy to use that it will save you weeks over the Java equivalent, while giving you magnitudes faster startup times and decent testability. In programming there are so many angles to consider, that simplistic answers are rarely do reality justice. There is however the danger of wearing rose tinted glasses when weighing the cons of the more exciting solution.
jstummbillig 4y ago
Agreed. The first scenario really suffers from conflating "boring" with "obsolete". If anything, most exciting technology has a much higher propensity to becoming obsolete than, and also long before, most boring technology does.
- a-priori 4y ago
  Yes I think this is the key insight: if you have two technologies that will solve your problem, both reasonably popular and actively developed, the one that is ten years old is far more likely to still be actively developed in another ten years than one that is one year old. You're using survivorship bias in your favour.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Well, only if both work about as well as each other. Good technologies are likely to outsurvive bad ones once the good ones get a minimum of popularity.
ksec 4y ago
Yes, something like PHP / Laravel and Ruby Rails, but not Perl.

atoav 4y ago

"Choose boring technologies" is one of those phrases that makes sense when it makes sense, unless it doesn't. I find the negative expression of the same idea much more fitting: "Don't choose technology purely out of exitement". In that negative version the word purely does the heavy lifting: If all you have as a reason to choose a thing is excitement it might be a bad choice unless you can afford a failed attempt. In reality very often the "more exciting" choice will also come with their own additional pros/cons. It might be that your exciting Rust-Webservice has a smaller community backing its components, but maybe the APIs of the few components you really interact with is such a joy to use that it will save you weeks over the Java equivalent, while giving you magnitudes faster startup times and decent testability. In programming there are so many angles to consider, that simplistic answers are rarely do reality justice. There is however the danger of wearing rose tinted glasses when weighing the cons of the more exciting solution.

jstummbillig 4y ago

Agreed. The first scenario really suffers from conflating "boring" with "obsolete". If anything, most exciting technology has a much higher propensity to becoming obsolete than, and also long before, most boring technology does.

a-priori 4y ago
Yes I think this is the key insight: if you have two technologies that will solve your problem, both reasonably popular and actively developed, the one that is ten years old is far more likely to still be actively developed in another ten years than one that is one year old. You're using survivorship bias in your favour.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, only if both work about as well as each other. Good technologies are likely to outsurvive bad ones once the good ones get a minimum of popularity.

ksec 4y ago

Yes, something like PHP / Laravel and Ruby Rails, but not Perl.