>In my professional experience, people that are always learning new languages or are constantly using new libraries and frameworks are never the ones who accomplish the most.

There's a huge difference between chasing fashion and seeking out what is new that is actually better.

I agree that those people are usually worse. The ones that pick up on new stuff that isn't necessarily fashionable, assess it intelligently and balance the trade offs of the good vs the bad - those are the better programmers.

IME scala programmers are better - mostly because they tend to be programmers who got frustrated with java's shortcomings and realized scala solved many of those shortcomings, not because it's fashionable to learn scala.

IMO people who chased mongo, on the other hand, demonstrated a responsiveness to large marketing budgets rather than critical thinking skills.

You don't have to try out every new technology either. There are some that you just have to read a bit about to know enough to dismiss them.

Hey, I resemble that comment!

As someone with extensive experience in both Scala and Mongo, I agree. Mongo is nice for experiments that might go nowhere, but when you give it a real production workload, it falls apart fast.

I agree with you on people who are constantly chasing the ball, but I also think that's a false dichotomy. To me, if there's someone who can demonstrate a deep understanding of the features that lend merit to newfangled tech, _and_ they have a track record of delivering well architected, appropriately engineered products, that's a win all around.

It's pretty easy to find people who use "boring tech" and still fall prey to the hazards of overengineering, slow delivery, etc.

Yeah, I think my generalization is probably as unfair as the authors. I think I was mainly trying to provide a counterpoint to the idea that those programmers were better. In reality, trying new tech is probably not strongly correlated to programming skill in either direction.

Great points here! I agree with you that there are people who chase after novelty and don't complete most of what they start. If the person is naive about it then I would be weary about hiring them, but it depends on the persons motives.

If they are doing it to experiment with a new library/framework then finishing may not be the point; it could be to see if the tool is worth the hype or if it adds unnecessary complexity.

This exploratory tinkering has been good for me personally because it has developed my sense for parsing out the bullshit used to market new tools.

On the other hand, in my experience, people who over-specialize tend to have very narrow perspectives on any software problem.

If I had to choose between the guy who's done 10 years C# and the guy whose done 2 years C# and 2 years JavaScript, I'd pick the latter all the time.

As a friend of mine put it, "for most people, a 10-years experience is 10 times a 1-year experience".