I dig my heels in when new tech drops these days. Been burned too many times. Want to use it? Prove it works. Qualify it properly.
Conservative engineering builds better quality products and benefits the user the most.
Conservative engineering builds better quality products and benefits the user the most.
I’ve had to deal with a situation recently where they’ve become so conservative that they’re afraid to even consider embr@cing tests, build tools (I.e, use ant/maven/gradle instead of Eclipse as the sanctioned build tool), dependency management (I.e, not just commit jars to source and never document anything), etc.
They guy in charge had been burned too many times, but part of that was his own fault for not providing sufficient oversight and advice to junior devs and frankly I’d say a degree of short sightedness with the general approach.
And I felt too junior to say anything. I figured that if the grown-ups want the new shiny, it must be worth something. In actual fact, our real-time, React-Native, ES7-experimental-flag would have been as easily built in php.
If you lack the skills to objectively assess new technology, perhaps technology isn't the field for you.
> Prove it works. Qualify it properly.
I'm the same way. I refuse to use whatever's hot tomorrow unless it's been qualified and tested. That's not knee-jerk conservatism, that's just smart product development.
I have had many bad experiences where unreliable software has fucked production even if it is the current fad and has an arena of consultants and conferences behind it. If you don’t independently test and understand the software and just chuck it in and see what happens, which is how some people think it should be done, then you’re burning your business badly.