| I'd venture that's a little too cynical, as it violates the "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by ineptitude" rule :) I'm not suggesting that something like resume-padding is never a motivation, just that it seems unlikely to be the sole or even primary motivation. Now, I may be wrong, but my reasoning behind this is that, for all its purported power as a tool, as potatoyogurt has alluded [1], it's really only the true experts who can wield that power effectively. The ones who merely succeeded at getting on their resume would only be able to use it where its power isn't truly needed (as was the case before). If the technology falls out of fashion, then those resume-holders will be in a position of needing to deliver the cargo, rather than carved wooden headphones. As such, I believe their motivation is actually to attempt to learn the true power of the tool (i.e. true resume building, rather than mere padding) and that they're grossly underestimating the costs through ignorance and a desire to learn by doing. The trouble is, without well-published non-distributed reference implementations and, instead, ultra-popularity of the distributed tools instead, they never end up learning those costs, and we're in a state of perpetuated ignorance and perpetuated over-use. [1] by saying that the cost trade-offs are well understood by the experts, which strongly implies that the experts have a pretty deep understanding of the actual mechanics of distributed computing in general. |