[jmde]

It does matter if you're aware of the cost:benefit ratio involved in adopting it relative to the existing tech, or even more commonly, the cost:benefit ratio involved in adopting it relative to adapting or modifying existing tech. Maybe as an employee, it might not be the right thing to be pushing with an employer enamored of the new tech, but as an objective onlooker, it very well may be.

There's plenty of amazing innovation happening all the time, so I don't want to come across as a luddite or whatever, but hype does happen, and as you get older, you witness more of it and become more skeptical of it. You see the fads come and go--the faster they come, the faster they go--and the survivor bias. The problem is that it's there, and it feels sometimes like you face the choice of correctly pointing that out, or being labeled a cynic.

[olalonde]

Sure, experience matters and some technologies get over-hyped. I was referring to the more specific case of dismissing a technology solely because it is a rehash or has failed in the past. For example, dismissing Docker because of LXC or FreeBSD jails. Or dismissing Node.js because it uses cooperative multitasking. Or dismissing SaaS because the "thin client model was tried and failed" (yes, just a decade ago, SaaS was considered over-hyped).