I was thinking the same thing. I wonder how much of it is due to the way we make devs work and the hours we make them keep.

For example, I'd be more than happy to use the same old, tried and true, boring tools to just get the job done, if it meant that I could then go play golf or otherwise not be in the office.

But if you insist that I be in my seat 8 hours a day regardless of workload, then goddamn let's take this shiny new tool for a spin!

Do I want my resume to show that I used the same tool for every job for the last ten years? Or do I want it show some new hotness?

The industry and employers are as much to blame for this as the engineers, if not more. When you use middleman firms to find your employees, and all they understand is buzzwords, well then guess what game the devs are gonna play?

I recently worked at a company with a working batch legacy system and an ongoing update to Python and SQL with newer tools. It processed large data but it fit in a big server. 3x the amount of people required.

They replaced it with Spark and Scala. Rewrote the whole thing and bumped into the same previously fixed problems for 8 months. It was not faster and it was a pain to extract the result data for the online website. Oh, and they had only 1 server running Spark. On top of the existing one. They also dumped IRC with very useful plugins for proprietary Slack channels.

Yeah, their resumes are very competitive now with the Big Data hype. Worst part is the higher ups liked it because they had more keywords in the bag for investors.

We are living in very strange times.

This to me is the real problem, especially in a larger company. I mentioned "Resume Driven Development" at work the other day and got the response from a peer of "that's how it should be."

Convincing others to not chase the shiny new toy is harder than picking the right technology. The other posts under this parent are right: we are a product of the job market.