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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this has been misunderstood for years. I note this paragraph:

But what I’m aiming for there is not technology that’s “boring” the way CSPAN is boring. I mean that it’s boring in the sense that it’s well understood. It’s bad, but you know why it’s bad. You can list all of the main ways it will let you down.

I understand F# more than I understand PHP. By the articles definition, F# is 'boring', and choosing to do something in PHP would be using up an innovation token.

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Another thing to keep in mind is the size of the candidate pool. There's a lot fewer F# devs than PHP. Can make hiring a bit trickier.

And I was under the impression that coders were thought of as replaceable cogs in a machine, one just as good as the next.

This is almost never a bad thing. It means you have fewer people to compete with when advertising a position and the people that use a niche technology generally have more passion for their craft.

Although it also delays hiring - I work for a startup using Kotlin, and we've had maybe three candidates _ever_ who have used Kotlin beyond hobby projects. And I was one of them!

You might get less volume, but you can use this as an advantage

Average quality is so much higher for certain languages (Clojure and OCaml also come to mind). I don’t mind a 5% pool size when 95% of the alternative can’t build things.

"Boring" is subjective, and even objectively defined it can't be measured. Therefore yes IMHO, F# qualifies as 'boring' for you.

However, unless you're an isolated entity (e.g., SOHO) or fully remote, your business environment also factors into that equation. Node.js might be 'boring' in the USA but anecdotal (read: edgy) in entire subcontinents.

Economically speaking, a 'boring' tech stack is one that generates the least 'friction' for its devs. (friction may be construed as added cost beyond base material requirements, eg. time or complexity added by bureaucracy, or cognitive toll induced by steep-n-quirky learning curves, as opposed to the fastest road to MVP / RC / shipping).

If it works you and/or your org, then yeah.

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