[ksec]

If I ever be a CEO of the company / Startup, that one criteria I made is either I decide on all the technologies we use, or there is no CTO so i make those decision.

And that criteria of technologies could be summed into one sentence. Use something boring. No Hyped programming languages / DB / tools allowed.

Of course some would argue you would be doing it wrong even if it was using old tech / programming / tools. Well yes, but you have a sea of recourse and expertise there to ask for help. Instead of spending energy and time doing figuring it out.

Of course if your company is all about tech innovation, AI or something cutting edge there surely you will have to tried something new. But 80% of those startup aren't.

[shoo]

Quoting Dan McKinley's "choose boring technology" [cbt]:

> Embrace Boredom.

> Let's say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity, but the general tendency is to overestimate the contents of your wallet. Clearly this model is approximate, but I think it helps.

> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that's existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you're in trouble.

> Any of those choices might be sensible if you're a javascript consultancy, or a database company. But you're probably not. You're probably working for a company that is at least ostensibly rethinking global commerce or reinventing payments on the web or pursuing some other suitably epic mission. In that context, devoting any of your limited attention to innovating ssh is an excellent way to fail. Or at best, delay success.

[CBT] http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

[aaronbrethorst]

I'm a fan of taking a 'one new technology' approach. When I'm building something new, I get to choose zero or one new technologies to play with, depending on whether I want to get shit done or learn something new.

By choosing at most one new thing, you can better control for how your stack should work and how you expect it to respond to certain unexpected circumstances, which means you should be able to more effectively solve issues as they crop up than you'd be able to if you were using multiple new technologies.

[fbr]

I agree with the main idea: working with hyped technologies is not a solution and you can build most of the things out there with boring technology.

But then ... you have to find, attract and hire good developers. That's already difficult, adding an extra layer of 'boring technology' will make this task even more challenging.