> Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."

Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing, and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the most straightforward way of solving the business problem.

I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas. They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.