[brianlweiner]

I don't even know if it's cargo culting as much as engineers using their day jobs as opportunities to learn marketable skills for job hopping.

Nearly ever new technology introduced at places I've worked was because someone was keen to get it onto their resume.

[eugenekolo]

I believe this might fall under "resume driven development"

[lupire]

But why are the skills marketable, if no business needs them?

Why are companies hiring people who proudly put Overengineer as their job title on resume?

[TrackerFF]

New and shiny > old and dull.

At least as far as marketing goes, when trying to hire young and hungry devs. More so at startups.

My old job was quite spread geographically and organizationally - lots of small offices with engineers that had more or less total freedom when it came to tooling. It was actually a gov. agency - so that might surprise someone, but it was one of those places that was transitioning to the digital age, and therefore, didn't really have much solid structure.

The various teams pretty much used the tools they wanted to solve the problems at hand - I think we had three different versioning control systems at play, and multiple different databases. Working with data across the organization was a total nightmare.

But we did have a common platform for communication, sharing stuff, and all that. I think we were around 250 devs. and engineers, and a survey shoved that we used over 20 different programming languages.

One thing I DO remember, was that some people in most teams were constantly pushing for the latest (as in 1-3 years old) tools. Someone's writing an API in Flask? No - screw that. FastAPI where it's at. Team x is still writing RESTful APIs? We're doing GraphQL. And that's how it went.

When some of these guys would end up in dev. blogs or being interviewed, they'd of course push the "See, we're not old and stuffy anymore. We've hired lots of young engineers, and right now we're using [trendy stack]"

[AQuantized]

Clearly there are businesses that serve millions or billions of users, and have a serious need for engineers with experience with the tools to do so. Engineers seeking those jobs are then motivated to use those tools to engineer systems serving orders of magnitude fewer customers simply so they can claim that experience.