Choose Boring Technology (2015)
I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a &quot;bad hire&quot;, and yet once hired they don&#x27;t spend a second making sure engineers aren&#x27;t completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy&#x27;s backend in Scala and MongoDB. That probably cost the company X million dollars. Etsy could still be recovering from that.<p>The industry constantly mints senior engineers who have been bitten by complexity, but doesn&#x27;t want to hire them, or listen to them. More often than not senior engineers pretend to be excited about complecting the tech stack, because hey, it pads their resume with the latest buzzwords and they&#x27;ve given up trying to fight against it anyway.<p>The last line of defense against a rogue engineering team is managers who have studied this stuff. How many engineering managers can spot the common situation &quot;the engineers are bored and they&#x27;re rewriting perfectly-good codebases in Common Lisp and OCAML for funsies&quot;? And how many know what to do about it when they see it?<p>Anyway, this is a cool website, and it&#x27;ll be useful to point people to it in the future, so thanks for that.