[cocktailpeanuts]

In my experience, it's not the developers who fall into this trap, it's the culture--nobody wants to learn some random technology that will probably be obsolete in a year (and I'm not even joking when I say this, this really is the reality)

The only situation where you are not affected is if you're a freelancer and you don't need to worry about what's going on around you.

I'm not going to mention where, but I worked at a well known company which you've heard of (you probably would know it as an innovative company), and everyone who worked there was very talented, there is absolutely no doubt about that. But I got sick of what's happening around me and quit recently.

Here's what happened: In the last couple of years a few people started talking about all this "cool new javascript testing/packaging/templating/single page app building" frameworks. Since it is indeed a "cool thing" to talk about these, and since they believe that potential new hires would be excited to learn that we use these hip new technologies to power our company, they started implementing EVERYTHING that the OP mentioned in the article. Of course, I'm sure it looks really cool from a recently graduated college kid's point of view when they interview. But anyway, suddenly the company culture started revolving around these hip technology advocates. I can understand why but at the same time it's really stupid because they keep switching out their stack and spend their money on useless crap instead of actually spending it on building the actual product. For example, they've transitioned from browserify to grunt to webpack in just last two years.

So when I read this article I totally sympathized with the guy.

If you're a web developer who works at a large company that wants to be seen as "innovative" (especially the ones that are already seen as being technically innovative), this is exactly what's going on. And you only have two choices: You either jump on the bandwagon and become one of the "in" crowd, or complain like the rest and be left behind and seen as a "laggard". When I saw these otherwise intelligent programmers moving like bunch of lemmings to adopt the latest new technology I couldn't help but feel pity for them. They grow old day by day thinking they're becoming a better programmer but all they're doing is learning some library that's designed so that the code monkeys can be managed better. They should be spending less time on those meta things and spend more time on building what a user wants instead. At least that's why I became a programmer.

[marrs]

This is very true and cool shiny new things are hard to counter, mostly because ones instinct is to point out the deficiency in the "innovation", which is often only obvious to you.

The best way I've found to counter this is to give your own demonstration showing how you achieved the same (or better) coolness with existing technology, and you did it faster, and it can be integrated into the code base today.

This gives your argument real substance and people have to at least now argue against facts and data rather than hand-wavy speculation.