"sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered", says Wikipedia. However, investment in Rails can be "recovered", because it's a useful, marketable skill. Switching to something else will incur costs as well, so the benefits would need to be both high and certain to really make it a 'sunk cost fallacy', no?
It is. You're conflating several different notions. A sunk cost fallacy is the idea that because you've invested a certain amount of resources (time, in this case) in a particular approach, it would be foolish to switch because all the resources you've already expended would be "wasted."
My understanding is that sunk cost fallacies are where people consider the past when they should be only looking at the future. However, the future in his case means that he has Rails knowledge X, and has Padrino knowledge 0, so looking at the future from right now, Rails still makes sense unless Padrino is so much better that it outweighs the switching costs.
> A sunk cost fallacy is the idea that because you've invested a certain amount of resources (time, in this case) in a particular approach, it would be foolish to switch because all the resources you've already expended would be "wasted."
No, you're using the wrong word here. It isn't a sunk cost when you've invested resources (i.e. can recover value from those resources in the future), it's when you've spent (i.e. cannot recover value from the resources) resources.
The knowledge gained from learning Rails is obviously recoverable, and can be directly applied to future work. Throwing that away is not a sunk cost issue.
I stand corrected then. In my defense, however, I was talking about the time invested being a sunk cost, as the time is not recoverable -- and that's what the person I was responding to mentioned. The time.
"sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered", says Wikipedia. However, investment in Rails can be "recovered", because it's a useful, marketable skill. Switching to something else will incur costs as well, so the benefits would need to be both high and certain to really make it a 'sunk cost fallacy', no?