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Choose Boring Technology

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Re: Choose Boring Technology

#11

Post by edynoid »

Interesting… most of the motivation to use new tech is that it enables me to solve problems more efficiently. When you use older, but more established technology, its limitations still hold back the problem solving a bit. This is especially hard to take when I know there are better solutions out there. And it also costs more time & money.

There probably is a pain point somewhere, where it makes sense to switch. I did like the point about reducing the cost of new technology – that may be quite often easier said than done though.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#13

Post by tw1010 »

dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

History is filled with re-discovery and explanation of things that were blindingly obvious to the generation that came before.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#14

Post by rlonn »

neilwilson wrote: post #5

There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…

Recipe for getting things done:

1. Place every new & cool technology into mental quarantine for 3-5 years. 2. If, after that: a) the tech is still widely used, and doesn't seem to be getting overtaken by something else b) you're about to start a NEW project where the tech would help c) you're not in a rush and feel like trying something new

...then go for it.

Learning complex tech that just arrived is a waste of your life, if you want to accomplish things. It's only useful if your aim is to appear knowledgeable and "in the loop" to your developer peers.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#15

Post by endymi0n »

tw1010 wrote: post #13
dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

History is filled with re-discovery and explanation of things that were blindingly obvious to the generation that came before.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

― George Santayana

"I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive."

― Kurt Vonnegut

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#16

Post by virgilp »

neilwilson wrote: post #5

There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…

You know, it's the same as with financial advice. Good financial advice is good.... except if absolutely everyone applies it, then it becomes a disaster. Fortunately, there's no risk of that happening.

Same here. No matter what you do, leave others to try the cool new stuff & get burned by it & work to fix it (when/if possible). Stay informed, but don't be an early-adopter. It's sound advice - though it wouldn't be if everyone applied it. Fortunately, there's no risk of that happening.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#17

Post by jasode »

As a meta observation, I noticed this was submitted by user luu and his website also has a blog post with a similar theme ("boring languages"[1]). Therefore, I wonder if the "boring vs exciting" advice somewhat depends on the personality. I.e. if person has a tendency to prefer conservative technology, it means external advice that advocates "boring tech" will resonate with that person.

I think choosing boring technology makes sense but I'll give a contrarian view anyway.

A lot of people like new and shiny things because it's interesting and spurs the imagination for future work.

For example, in 1974 when the new Altair 8800 made the cover of Popular Electronics[2], an excited Paul Allen showed the magazine to a 19-year old Bill Gates. The "boring tech" advocates would tell them they're wasting their time with the "new fad of microcomputers" and they should look at boring IBM 360 mainframes instead. Those IBM machines were around since the 1960s and were more proven. The problem is that Bill and Paul weren't interested in those mainframes. The choice isn't proven/unproven. The choice was really interested/uninterested.

Similar situation with WhatsApp in 2009. Apple just released the iPhone SDK in 2008. The older tech was PalmOS, Windows Mobile CE, and Symbian. Those legacy mobile operating systems were around since the 1990s. It didn't matter to Jan Kuom that the new iPhone didn't have a track record. It was the more interesting platform to work on and he made a bet to write an app for it.

From what I read, Google's first AdWords server in 2000 was built on MySQL. MySQL was released in 1995 so using a relatively new 5-year old technology may have been more risky than picking traditional Oracle RDBMS which had been around since the late 1970s.

It's ok to choose new and unproven tech if you have a coherent thesis of why it makes sense to try it. You also have to be willing to pay the price if your bet turns out to be wrong. You can also deliberately choose boring tech in as many areas as possible so it frees up brainpower to aggressively make a bet on new unproven tech in a particular area where you think it will make a difference.

Also, your role dictates the freedom to use new and unproven tech. If you're an employee at a mature and conservative company, you'll be constrained to choose boring technology to minimize risk. (This reinforces the saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.") On the other hand, if you're an entrepreneur, there's a good chance you'll need to make a calculated risk with new exciting technology that is (1) unproven, (2) has non-existent documentation, (3) does not have much tooling to make implementation easy.

At one point, even all the "boring technology" was new and interesting. In 2019, what's some new and unproven tech that we should look at?

[1] https://danluu.com/boring-languages/

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=altair+8800+magazine+cover&s...

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#18

Post by amelius »

endymi0n wrote: post #15
tw1010 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is filled with re-discovery and explanation of things that were blindingly obvious to the generation that came before.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ― George Santayana "I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive." ― Kurt Vonnegut

There's even an expression for it: reinventing the wheel.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#19

Post by murgindrag »

dm3 wrote: post #3

Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume. Great that he's spreading the word!

I thought this was one of the best articulations, though. All it needs is a CC-BY-SA license so it can be used outside of one blog.

Re: Choose Boring Technology

#20

Post by reallydontask »

neilwilson wrote: post #5

There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…

I spoke once with a Microsoft consultant, he was advising us on upgrading strategy, as our customer had a mandate to be at least on version N-1, that is the customer must be on the latest major version or the version before, so at the time we were migrating off Windows 2003 as Windows 2012 was going through internal validation.

He mentioned that on a bank he'd been advising, the mandate was the opposite, namely at most they could be on N-1 and were in the exact same position as we were, except that they were migrating to Windows 2008 and we to Windows 2012 as the N-1 mandate in practice meant that we'd upgrade services every other release, except when there was a waiver, which was often and explained why when I left in late 2012 we still had some Windows 2000 boxes.

As a techie, it was always a pain going back to an old box as you'd try to do something and realise that it was not possible as that feature had only been introduced in later versions. Even worse, was when it was possible but extremely convoluted and error prone.

It's interesting how everybody thinks that it's career suicide to support old stuff when it actual fact most people are hired for a mixture of their knowledge and their capacity to learn. I appreciate that it's lower risk to hire somebody with experience on the exact product but would you rather have an extremely good engineer with no experience in your stack or a good one with experience in your stack?

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