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I struggle mightily with this in managing projects. My instinct is to use solid boring tech, and maximize chance of delivering on time. But I've found that: 1.

I struggle mightily with this in managing projects. My instinct is to use solid boring tech, and maximize chance of delivering on time. But I've found that: 1.) No one writes blog posts about using old boring stuff and meeting expectations. And such blog posts can contribute to recruiting and even, indirectly, sales, by helping your company get general press for being "on the cutting edge." 2.) You can potentially get better overall results even if the new tech has more gotchas and unknowns, because certain developers will knock themselves out to deliver on time and prove you were right in trusting them with the platform/language decisions. But you have to pick very wisely on this and keep in mind such devs may immediately lever their experience on the new tech to get a new job and leave you with a team of juniors that wander lost without their guru.

andix 4y ago
I think it’s still possible to use some modern aspects in combination with boring old tech. One thing I found useful is: try to build something that is boring old tech, but the boring tech can be switched out easily. Like a monolith that can be also split up into micro services (via a build flag).
whstl 4y ago
I don't think "solid boring", or even old, is necessarily bad for recruiting. Typescript and Golang for example, are relatively new-ish but still solid and boring, and have significantly much less gotchas than older established tech like, say, Rails. I don't do Java, but I see it getting a bit of a renaissance. Either because of new features or because people are moving to Kotlin (yep for backends), which is a different language but still has the "solid boring" feel to it. It is tough to hire for devops, though. The currently experienced people want to work with more complex infrastructure. Maybe we need a few more years to see those people getting burned and deciding they don't want to life an exciting work-life anymore.

andix 4y ago

I think it’s still possible to use some modern aspects in combination with boring old tech. One thing I found useful is: try to build something that is boring old tech, but the boring tech can be switched out easily. Like a monolith that can be also split up into micro services (via a build flag).

whstl 4y ago

I don't think "solid boring", or even old, is necessarily bad for recruiting. Typescript and Golang for example, are relatively new-ish but still solid and boring, and have significantly much less gotchas than older established tech like, say, Rails. I don't do Java, but I see it getting a bit of a renaissance. Either because of new features or because people are moving to Kotlin (yep for backends), which is a different language but still has the "solid boring" feel to it. It is tough to hire for devops, though. The currently experienced people want to work with more complex infrastructure. Maybe we need a few more years to see those people getting burned and deciding they don't want to life an exciting work-life anymore.