Re:Normalization of deviance in software: broken practices b...
by chris_t on Sunday December 03, 2017 @12:23PM
(#15838461)
A big reason for the bias towards new things is that greenfield development is easier and more fun, especially in organisations that aren't capable of producing good software. Learning a new framework every couple of years makes sense if it means you get to avoid having to work on confusing spaghetti code from a decade ago.
Because it's so much fun to create new things in our industry, so much new stuff gets created. Often it's only marginally better than what came before, or more frequently, it's only better in one dimension, and significantly worse in other dimensions. But it gets adopted because it has social currency, recency, buzz, etc. and all the deficiencies slowly get filled in. And by the time it's mature, something else new comes along.
As long as we keep hiring cheap kids to build our stuff, they'll keep reinventing the wheel, and the workforce available to hire will only understand, and more importantly only want to work with, the latest popular fads.