[est31]

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money to most people who choose that career. It's no conservative choice. Instead, it's conservative to go into STEM, law or finance. But those fields are "boring". The pattern repeats inside a field as well. It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert, and you'll certainly make money. But it's not fashionable. How come you aren't building a cryptocurrency using self driving car that has a drone port on the roof! It results in the woke fields being overrun with very smart and capable people and capital, while tons of fields that use slightly outdated stuff are ripe for harvest but nobody is around to do it.

[simonh]

I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

[est31]

> The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

That's not conservative. Being conservative means that you only follow a change if it makes sense. If you adopt some new technology, you should do it because it convinces you that it's better, not because it's new, wasn't available before, everyone else is doing it, or any other such reason. If you are conservative, you don't neccessarily end up doing what the majority is doing, as most times, the majority is following some empty hype.

That's because his use of that word is wrong: everything said in that article contradicts that statement.

[ksdale]

I think your definition of conservative is correct, but it assumes the thing you’re trying to conserve is something like energy spent on new/different approaches. I think pg’s definition of conservative in this case assumes the thing being conserved is something like prestige or credibility.

As an aside, in my experience it’s a fairly common usage to describe any behavior that avoids risk along some dimension, which could very well mean going with the herd, if you’re trying to conserve social status.

[bartread]

> It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert...

For most people entering a career in tech over the last 20 years those haven't been a consideration, never mind a choice (conservative or otherwise).

Nowadays the conservative choices in the sense that PG is talking about here are Java, .NET, Python, C++, C, and possibly AWS and Amazon. But these are also what the market demands.

You will get paid, and probably quite well, but they are not adventurous choices.

[bartread]

EDIT: AWS and Azure.