[aphextron]

>"If we stand our ground and choose boring technology because we have limited innovation tokens and can't afford to waste them, there's the flight risk of those devs who really want to work with those new technologies."

That's fine, let them go. There are plenty of great developers out there who just want to come to work, build the product to spec in some 'boring' reliable tech, and go home. The stack doesn't really matter. The "mission" doesn't really matter. Even the product barely matters. I've found that people who are leaving a job for the new shiny thing are either very early career, or the dilettantes who leave behind messes to be cleaned up by professionals.

Massive companies have been built around a Spring/Rails/Zend monolith with a few jQuery plugins on the frontend. Anyone who thinks they need more than that is probably wrong.

[rubber_duck]

>There are plenty of great developers out there who just want to come to work, build the product to spec in some 'boring' reliable tech, and go home.

No there aren't, in fact there aren't plenty of "great" (or pick any adjective related to competent) devs in general, so if you're a small shop and can't compete on wages, work conditions (tech stack included) is your only competitive edge. Because you know what there is plenty of ? Enterprise gigs that need competent people to maintain a legacy cash cow or business backbone - and working in those environments has competitive advantages compared to working in small companies - corporate pace is usually 1/2, company stability, climbing the corporate ladder - if you're a 9-5 guy these things mean a lot. Even those places need to mix in flavour of the day tech to keep their devs from leaving the mind numbing work they feed them.

[tomnipotent]

> No there aren't

Yes, there are. Such a ridiculous statement to think people can't be great at something just because they don't tick some arbitrary box you came up with for evaluation.

If that's the case, then there are no great 9-5 anything... but the odd thing is, I've met plenty of them.

[rubber_duck]

You aren't getting what I'm trying to say - the market for competent 9-5 is also missing developers - it's not that there aren't any - it's that demand > supply - which is why OP is worried about his employees leaving - it's not like he can go out there with a job posting and have 5 competent applicants in a week. You will have to pay recruiters serious money and hope to get lucky on competent leads - so "there are plenty" argument is BS.

[tomnipotent]

> so "there are plenty" argument is BS.

Just like your argument, which pulls claims out of thin air. You haven't made any points at all, simply rambled about competence without backing anything up.

I've learned more often than not, that when someone claims "competence" what they're really saying is "I'm not finding the exact skills I'm looking for, which are hyper-contextualized around the problem I'm currently facing, at the exact moment I need them at the cost I think is best. Which will change in six months, at which point a different cohort of people will be labeled incompetent."