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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

As an engineering manager who's had to push adoption of new technologies, I feel this argument in my bones.

That said, taking your argument to the extreme, we all probably should've stuck with PHP, since everyone understood it and, well, was it really worth the switching cost? Naturally that's dumb, so there's a certain amount of "how do we get there?" with any new technology that's probably a good idea.

That's probably not going to get answered by the principal engineer who says This Tech Is The Future. It's going to get answered by people like you who think about switching costs and the impact new tech has on people.

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> taking your argument to the extreme, we all probably should've stuck with PHP, since everyone understood it and, well, was it really worth the switching cost?

There are multiple paths for honing a new technology, without dumping it on a large group of developers while it's in its experimental stages:

- Use it for a series of side-projects

- Use it in a startup or startup-like team in which all the developers are bought into it, and happy to work through the obstacles

- Use it at an organization that's both able and willing to devote a large amount of resources to making it work (e.g. devoting a full-time team to its development & support & related training)

Once the kinks have been sufficiently worked out in one of those contexts, and a solid ecosystem with good documentation exists, then there's a much better chance that the benefits will be worth the switching costs for the average project.

I haven't worked on large gaming projects, but I've worked on large CG feature films. I was a little horrified about how aggressively they adopted some technologies. The theory was that Pixar proved a lot of their technologies in their short films (Disney a bit of that, too, in previous years). The studio I was at didn't do that and both Disney and Pixar seem to have moved away from that at least a decade ago. Very very rarely, they'd repurpose old projects or chose a sequence or specific department for releasing something--that often was a mess (resources spent at the "boundaries" instead of shoring up the new tech).

I imagine AAA games are similar. You have 4 years and ship one monolithic game. Maybe you could prove out this idea in a small area like artist's tools or an engine fork (similar to the approaches above). Trying to incrementally adopt something would take 2 or 4 games (10+ years) and I just don't see technology roadmaps like that. Especially if it's not a huge win.

I would hope any good principal engineer spends a decent amount of time considering switching costs and impacts of new technology. Sounds like this isn't your experience though?

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