Couldn't agree more. The bandwagon effect is something also worth mentioning. Tech stacks and tools these days are branded almost as consumer products and the outcome is poorly designed systems.
The net present value to a developer of dooming their current employer's current project by choosing an unsuitable technology which they could put on their resume to negotiate future salary (at a position they'll be moving to in, on average, months not years) is going to swamp betting on something boring but stable, completing the project, staying put and crossing their fingers for raises that outpace inflation.
The root problem here is our hiring and interviewing system.
Imagine if interviewing rewarded "look I know all this stuff about writing simple functions in Stack X" less than "yes, the project shipped, and beat its deadline, because we decided to use library Y that the devs already knew even with the acknowledged pain points, instead of bringing a new technology in just for this project. We have some less-mission critical areas where we decided to experiment with new tech, but needed something predictable here."
Evaluating a senior dev based on junior-dev-esque implementation tasks instead of "does this person know how to avoid over-complicating our job?" is ludicrous. As an industry we interview to find "clever" people rather than "wise" people.
The problem in my experience working in "enterprise" shops is that more often that that, most of the employee hierarchy is in on the scam - managers know developers are padding hours, developers know middle managers are peddling snake oil up the chain, and senior managers are painting a picture of success to their superiors to get their big fat bonus. And very often, almost all of it is an illusion, and when everyone's done and the final product sucks for end users, everyone responsible has long ago declared it to be a smashing success and moved on, and the poor support developers have Yet Another Over-engineered Mess on their hands. Rinse, repeat.
The purest capitalistic endavours are drug deals, theft and scams.
The more refined variants, which find law loopholes and apply them with leverage,are still the same approach.
Look at those jailbirds under the sky, they do not sow, but our Lord the Ford, supplies them better then those working none the less.
The shareholders of a company know this deep down as well, so one serial scam series later- the comon pension er who had to use bad software all his life, can retire knowing he ripped off some poor schmock to have this.
Outside of web development, you can get a job fine without using this year framework. However, you still have to leave after a year to get more than inflation.
> you still have to leave after a year to get more than inflation
This hits home. I've been in software development for quite some time (10 years), I've been with 4 employers so far (full time) and pretty much all my significant raises have come as a result of me looking for a better paying position and then leaving. I may have been unlucky (I also did not work for a really large company yet), but I feel like the "career develoment" opportunities within software engineering companies are way under the level they should be.
I think this has been the way of the tech industry, and particularly SV, for a long time now. My uncle, now passed away, started at Atari in the early 80s and hopped companies every three years until his final job with Nvidia in a fairly senior position. He stayed with Nvidia until his death a little over a year ago.
Each time he switched it up he grew his salary exponentially.
It's not a tech issue, it's a business issue. Why give people bigger raises than they may otherwise ask for? That's just wasting money. It's the same logic for why you only get a good deal when you threaten to leave your mobile phone provider. They don't want to proactively reduce your rate or make it too easy to get a discount otherwise they might be doing it unnecessarily.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
With work, it's also about an employee's best alternative, and also the psychology of "well, you used to work for x, so we'll only pay you a small increase since that's obviously what you'll work for". It's as much the psychological aspect as anything else since it's difficult to decide the "price" of something without any reference (i.e. a new employee).
My experience in Australia is this is OK. Very few companies for example would expect you to have React experience. If you have any web framework experience (or just know JS well) you are OK.
Usually on the back end they are fussy about your main stack, e.g. C# -> Ruby would be hard. Java -> C# more possible. However within that, which frameworks you have used, e.g. Akka, NHibernate etc. doesn't matter.
NoSQL, or any particular DB technology is rarely expected.
My experience is companies are fairly conservative with their tech choices here. A 4 yr old framework is typical! Usually there will be 1 or 2 cutting edge things being tried out, but without uprouting everything.
Therefore it's crucial to have a nice work culture. When employers only think of themselves, employees copy that. On the other hand the people doing the actual coding must also be able to learn something new, that's just how the technology world works. If the employers don't help with that, the employees are doomed eventually.
Exactly, frameworks and tools are resume driven, everyone is putting new ones as a means to sell themselves to companies, do conference talks, set up their consultancy, ....
And when they move along to the new shiny thingy, those tech stacks die unless they achieved momentum beyond the usual adoption curve.