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Comment by joeldidit | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the idea of not wasting time, but if you follow the advice given here, you'll come across much like a narrow-minded idiot middle/product manager with an extremely short-term focus. Your choice.

Programmers need to grow, so it's important for there to be opportunities to try new technology. Obviously this can't frequently get in the way of the main thing, but it matters; you don't want to fall behind.

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Nothing in the piece argues that one shouldn't try new technology. Under this 85%-rule-of-thumb, we went with Amazon Web Services for 100% of our infrastructure in 2008. It was clearly the right choice, and worth learning. My point was more that developers have a gravitational pull toward new and interesting that needs to be tempered by a focus on what's best for the business--and too often, it is not.

I agree with what the article says about outsourcing things that aren't core to the business. I was responding to and disagreeing with another point the article tries to make about the use of employee time (which prioritizes the short-term over the long-term).

Couldn't agree more with this. The notion of an "85% rule" seems unnecessary as long as business features are being implemented regularly and by their target milestones.

The idea of the 85% rule is more a rule of thumb than some kind of rigid metric--I mean, I'm not sure how you would even quantify that.

But I would argue that "as long as business features are being implemented regularly" is too vague to be useful. You could be regularly implementing business features and still have half of development time building some framework that is unnecessary.

I think learning is what keeps devs happy and interested in their job and that's a good thing. In my opinion, having a restricting mentality in the workplace will lower morale and lead to shitty code.

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