Some are engineers. But when you don't flit like a magpie to the new shiny you become a codger or geezer. Managers can't tell the difference, gotta just buzzword pad your resume to get a job.
There’s something to be said for balancing conservatism, because there is far to much risk of just becoming an obstacle in the way of making any progress.
I’ve had to deal with a situation recently where they’ve become so conservative that they’re afraid to even consider embr@cing tests, build tools (I.e, use ant/maven/gradle instead of Eclipse as the sanctioned build tool), dependency management (I.e, not just commit jars to source and never document anything), etc.
They guy in charge had been burned too many times, but part of that was his own fault for not providing sufficient oversight and advice to junior devs and frankly I’d say a degree of short sightedness with the general approach.
Nothing like the lead engineer fiddling with the tooling and the tech stack every day and not mentioning it to anyone, to sap productivity. I started to anticipate spending the first couple of hours every day tweaking to my development environment and dependencies to resolve today's mystical crash.
And I felt too junior to say anything. I figured that if the grown-ups want the new shiny, it must be worth something. In actual fact, our real-time, React-Native, ES7-experimental-flag would have been as easily built in php.
I’ve worked in that sort of environment before. Watch out for senior staff obsessively following certain people promoting bandwagons built on lies, conferences and marketing. Next thing you know you hit a wall that’s metres thick and high.
It's not knee-jerk conservatism. Literally in his comment:
> Prove it works. Qualify it properly.
I'm the same way. I refuse to use whatever's hot tomorrow unless it's been qualified and tested. That's not knee-jerk conservatism, that's just smart product development.
I have had many bad experiences where unreliable software has fucked production even if it is the current fad and has an arena of consultants and conferences behind it. If you don’t independently test and understand the software and just chuck it in and see what happens, which is how some people think it should be done, then you’re burning your business badly.
