I believe the term for this is resume driven development. This also leads developers to focus on learning new technologies and integrating them to their current

I believe the term for this is resume driven development. This also leads developers to focus on learning new technologies and integrating them to their current project, whereas what the business really needs are stable boring solutions. Of course if developers do focus exclusively on serving the needs of the business, they’re not building up their skills for their next job, and the business could still fail for circumstances outside of their control. There’s a software law called Teslers law [1], which says that complexity cannot be eliminated, the most that can be done is to shift it from one part of the system to the next. You can make a similar law about risk. As a developer, if I ship a build system (complete a project successfully), or I build something with a new technology, I have a point to put on a resume and a successful accomplishment to talk about in my next interview. It may be that this is the wrong move for the business. It may be that they need a crappy spaghetti code abomination to achieve a product market fit in that time. If founders know what’s going on and they stipulate boring solutions the developer accepted risk. They’ve completely invested in the business and are completely tied to the decisions of their founders and leadership for their success. In a perfect world this would start a conversation about compensation for accepting or balancing risk, but in my experience this absolutely never happens because it gets political. Leaders always win because they’re better politicians than developers. It’s easy for leaders to be willfully ignorant and dismiss these concepts as too detail oriented, and devolves into leaders saying “we’re nice people, trust us”. But the risk is there and someone is accepting it and developers respond to this by mitigating it on their end deep in the implementation details. We have optimized at a local maximum, but are globally suboptimal. I do not believe we’ll ever achieve something more optimal because in business climates, everyone is trying to get something for very little effort. It takes much time to earn trust, but very little time to destroy it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_complexity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_compl...