| Nobody cares how the pie is made. They simply want pie. When it comes to new tech and frameworks, those who pay don't care if use React, Angular or Svelte. They only want a working product that provides value for money. Losing business has little to do with the technology that's being used or sold, it has everything to do with the problem that the business intends to solve or the need it intends to cater. And how well it succeeds in doing that. You don't become an outdated dinosaur overnight because someone comes up with technology that brings marginal improvements to the customer. You become an outdated dinosaur if your competition figures out a radical new way of doing things. IKEA didn't roll-up the furniture business because it re-invented chairs, tables, beds or cupboards. It succeeded in doing that because it successfully marketed self-assembly as a convenience to it's customers, eliminating a big part of the production chain. Moreover, that - in turn - opened up the door to disposable furniture by introducing low-cost materials, and a faster design cycle that has come to a point that it defines furnishing fashion trends. My point is that - as an engineering team - you could decide to switch to the newest framework, stay on edge in tech trends, and still miss the boat completely because business still sticks to an outdated model while customer behavior - wants, needs, trends,... - have already shifted a long way ago. Put differently, it's still possible to build a Facebook/Reddit/Twitter clone based on the latest and greatest technologies and still fail because you expect to push those out of that market. Whereas it's viable to do the same thing, but only if you differentiate by catering to the needs of a specific market segment. Hence why you see platforms like Mastodon thrive without exponential growth, even though Twitter caters to billions. A successful or stable product is by definition not tied to temporary trends. It caters to a universal need that people will always have. When the market is saturated and sales plateau, the trick then isn't to fundamentally re-invent your product. It's to use what you've learned and tackle an adjacent segment of the market with a new product or service. In software the vast majority of companies are one-trick ponies that stick to a single product or service that's too specific, and doesn't allow them to expand to other areas. That's what makes them so vulnerable for either a competitor that brings true business innovation, or fundamental shift in what consumers want next. Put more succinctly: people tend to rail against corporate, boring, byzantine constructions such as SAP. But that's exactly how they operate. They started out doing payroll and accounting, and they expanded from that by incorporating adjacent parts of business processes in their software such as logistics, material management and production planning. A corporation like SAP doesn't go along in the short-run hype cycle unless a significant game-changer comes along such as affordable cloud solutions. Now, hiring for experience in specific technologies or frameworks only makes sense if you're going to hire someone for the long haul, whereas if the horizon of your business doesn't extend beyond the next 2 or 3 quarters, well, you're shooting yourself in the foot by rejecting good, well-motivated candidates based on them not having 5 years experience with bleeding edge FancyFramework2020. |
When paying nobody cares about the tech. When hiring, all they care about is the tech.