Choose boring employees

10X developers may be rare...but I don't think it's so rare to see 10X productivity gains when it comes to tech stacks.

For example, a company who runs their own servers manually can see dramatic improvements in productivity and agility if they move to a newer tech stack and run on AWS or Heroku or some PaaS as an alternative.

Using JQuery may be the tried, true, and mature front end stack, but I've been able to rewrite front-end code in a different framework with less than 1/5th of the code to maintain.

To summarize, I think you should hire energized, motivated, continually educated employees that stay at the top of their game...not boring ones.

Yep and we will be looking at the cutting edge always to see if there are things we can use to improve our stack/development process.

> Your product will be a year more developed.

Well that is how software development works.

> You will have a year more customers.

Yes and we will therefore have at least some stable income too!

> You’ll have a year more tech debt to pay off.

Yes, but because we have kept up to date in trends and technology the debt is significantly less than one might expect. Plus we aren't laser beams (i.e. very narrowly focused) which means we are able to manage three primary goals: fix bugs, improve/add features, and maintain/improve our stack.

This post was not great imo.

I built it in react redux, because I thought it would raise "my" value.

I've had to rebuild that shit more times than I care to admit. Imho for a small dev shop picking react is a stupid choice. For a small dev shop picking node in the backend is IMHO also a stupid choice. I could go on with the list, but I'm going to stop knowing that I will already have upset enough people.

We've basically recreated the PHP problem. For whomever doesn't remember, before the first decent php frameworks like codeigniter(let's not talk about stuff like laravel) pretty much everyone built their own framework. After a couple of years when zend started to get traction they would integrate components from there.

The main issue wasn't all the security issues or the usual PHP complaints you hear. The main was the same you have in the javascript community:

> No two projects are the same

If you have time and money to waste for people to constantly update your tooling fine. But I don't. Hell just keeping up to date with airbnbs linting style guide was a major PITA.

EDIT: no I don't think the constant rewrites of redux and react router components, async connect, history etc. can be blamed on someone not having "enough experience in react". there's even a plugin to do regression tests on dependency updates. paying 100k for glorified javascript plumber jobs is unacceptable to me.

It's not about being boring. It's about being pragmatic and focused on actually executing.