[johnnyRose]

I hear that. I was once employed as the sole full time internal webapp developer for a local company with 600-ish employees to serve. Over time, more applications == more code == more bugs == more features/improvements == more "customers" to interact with... Being able to move that quickly was a lot of fun, but managing everything was challenging.

[noir_lord]

That's basically my job now.

Absolute technical freedom with absolute responsibility.

It's made me very cautious about adopting any 'new'/'shiny' technology, I'm sticking to things that already have mass market adoption and a proven track record because I simply don't have the time to disappear down rabbit holes.

I keep a scratch list of "this looks interesting, check back in a year" and sometimes even then it goes back on the "check back in a year" list.

[tluyben2]

Besides for research projects or your own company, in my opinion this should always be the case. I see people literally screwing their employers by introducing ‘shiny X’ (usually seen in a frontpage post on HN...) saying it will be faster. It never is in the greater scheme of things and it always costs more because it will have issues.

[noir_lord]

Couldn't agree more.

Outside of work on my own time I play with things I think might be useful or worth using a year or two from now, if they are fantastic, if not I learnt something and had fun.

At work it's PHP (I inherited that project sadly), C# and Java, On my radar in the next year are Kotlin and F# (Kotlin particularly since we have java applications in production on industrial handhelds and the codebase previous dev left on those is...worrying).

As for people screwing their employers by picking unproven new shiny, I think in the main part that's because of mismatched goals, Employer wants reliable software but doesn't understand what dev is doing and Employee wants a resume that will get them hired so skates to where the puck will be on the ooh shiny.

I've been programming since I was a kid in the 80's and the one thing I've learnt (often the hard way) that no language/framework/library is a substitute for thinking things out, that and everything is a trade off in some direction.

A 5mm square A4 pad and a pack of decent coloured pens has saved me thousands of hours over the years.

[tluyben2]

Also been programming since the early 80s and I do by far most programming in my head and on paper (I ‘just have to type it in’; that is mostly bullshit because of the real world vs my abstractions but it does save me a lot of wasted time behind a computer).

Screwing the employer is a tad harsh but I am the employer often and I see people coming up with these things, so I give them some room to play. Usually they just go back to the old ways when they see it is not that silver bullet the Medium article claimed. I just can imagine when someone does this with more power or less supervision within a company as an employee and actually costing the company money for some unproven and resume driven thing which does not necessarily bring any business value.