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Comment by anguslmm | Hacker News Reader

This is pure gold for fresher developers, and something of which more experienced devs could use a reminder.

Every fad and every champion of every technique or framework has something to teach you, and they are often very happy to teach it to you at the wrong time. Trying to please everyone at the start of the project is tantamount to design by committee, and is a sure way to kill a project.

To a hammer, everything looks like nails.

Well written.

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Thanks for reading it. It was one of the those ideas bouncing around in the back of my head for a while but hard to put into words then I read something about Tetlock and the dots sort of connected for me.

Software advice isn't totally a prediction, but it sort of is.

I think this is generally good advice for software engineering, accept when its not. The problem is that some bad ideas become better ideas by virtue of being popular ideas. Write a shitty framework/language/technology and you have nothing, convince a million people to use it and it becomes compelling because it has a lot of users working with it and solving problems.

Its the classic stone soup story[1]. You see this especially with software and tools that focus on front load new users making it really easy to do trivial things but failing catastrophically when you need more.

You also see the reverse of this, great ideas that don't get bye-in failing by virtue of being too niche.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

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