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I wrote a blog article (now defunct) years ago about this, which I called "The cyclical nature of shiny new hammers". This was the basic premise. If the workfor
by mbesto 2y ago
I wrote a blog article (now defunct) years ago about this, which I called "The cyclical nature of shiny new hammers". This was the basic premise. If the workforce is a bunch of carpenters and productivity apps are hammers, there will always be a subset of carpenters who chase after shiny new hammers. I do think there are productivity gains by these new hammers but they are marginal at best.
- dasil003 2y agoI like the analogy directionally, but I think it understates the problem significantly. A hammer is a tool used by an actual builder, the analogy for software engineers would be an IDE or perhaps certain programming languages or infra components. We've all known some practitioners who pay a little too much attention to the tools and not enough to the final output. Productivity tools in general are for larger scale endeavors with lots of ICs. At some point you start to have stakeholders whose only job is coordination. That's where the real risk of these systems lie—when their usage is so far removed from the actual work that needs doing that feeding the system becomes its own justification.
- someloudsounds 2y agoCould you share a link? Edit: missed "now defunct". But if it's somewhere on archive.org would love to read.