Choose boring employees

Flawed feedback. I trained myself in Elixir for a few weekends and once things started to click in my head (I was always an OOP / imperative programming guy so learning functional programming took me some trying) then I was able to do a mini-project that had real value... in 2 working days.

I didn't have to deal with dependencies for more than 10 seconds (not an exaggeration), I didn't have to transpile, I didn't have to include shims / polyfills, I didn't have to explicitly include 2-3 CLI "task runners", etc. weird crap from the JS ecosystem that everybody in there thinks is normal for some reason.

You can't just expect people to worship your tech stack and blame them for "not being experienced enough". Hell, if you put enough labor, you can get solid experience on a custom-tailored banking system written in COBOL, or custom-programmed FPGA CPU units. You can become an expert manual tailor, too. But that's not the point.

IMO the point is -- are you able to immerse yourself in the tech stack you're proclaiming and be useful in business terms no more than 1-2 weeks later? If no, then your stack isn't worth investing into, especially after your stack is known to change trends as if it's some kind of a glamour fashion empire.

I think the more important thing here isn't to choose 'boring' employees or tech stacks, but to choose what's actually needed for your situation.

If your site is a fancy web app where customers need to say, design their own website in the browser with a visual editor complete with Photoshop style image editing and what not, choose a tech stack that supports that as well as employees skilled with said stack.

That's a good use case for the latest Javascript framework you've been working with recently, along with cloud hosting on AWS or the likes.

On the other hand, if your site's just a content site (like say, a news blog or a basic forum), you really don't need all that fancy technology setup for it. Just create a nice basic frontend with HTML and CSS (with the odd line or two of Javascript where necessary), then use whatever your preferred scripting language and database is on the backend. Setting up a huge framework on AWS for this is like using a nuke to crack an egg.

And if you're looking for web hosting... well think hard about how popular your site is actually going to be first. Your tiny shop for local fishing supplies is not going to draw 50 million people a day, so you probably don't need a complex cloud hosting setup for it, nor a whole dedicated server/server farm.

Alas, a lot of people and companies nowadays seem less interested in choosing what they actually need so much as what sounds cool on their developers' CV/in online blog posts/on internet forums and Hacker News. So you get companies who are miles away from having any real customerbase whatsoever doing a boring job with technology better suited to Facebook and a couple of thousand a month cloud hosting bill.