[cookiecaper]

Yes, I strongly believe that this has been one of the strongest drivers of tech fads since at least 2010. People want to be like Google, so they copy Google. They don't understand that Google probably would've loved to be able to make the thing work with Oracle v. spending years developing their own internal systems, but the unique problem space put them at the disadvantage of needing to use a completely custom solution.

Google publishes an academic paper on this and the general public misinterprets it as a recommendation. Soon you see people writing open-source implementations "based on the GoogleThing Paper", and a new tech fad is born. It will consume billions of dollars before it dies in favor of another fad "based on the FacebookThing/TheNextGoogleThing Paper".

Walk up to most business guys and they will jump at the chance to "become more like Google". Try to talk them down from this, and your challenge is to convince that no, we don't want to be more like one of the most important and influential technology companies in the world, the company that's on the news every day, and whose logo he sees every time he looks at his phone, and the company who keeps taking all of the best hires from the universities. Worse, you'll be making that argument because "we're just not as big [read: important] as them". Not a promising position for the reasonable engineer.

This has been a terrible blight on our profession these last several years, but we just have to learn to roll with it. It's only by understanding and accepting the psychology around this that we can formulate effective counterstrategies, or make the best of the situation that's before us.