[cstrahan]

To add onto the sibling comment:

It is indeed a play on the saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. What wasn’t explained, though, is the meaning behind the expression. It’s an expression used to mock use of the bandwagon fallacy and a general lack of critical thought in the decision process.

If you’re responsible for choosing a vendor, the easy out is to pick one of the largest vendors available: if it’s what everyone else is doing, then you can waive away any personal accountability for any resulting failures by claiming that “it’s what everyone else is doing, so it must have been the right choice, and therefore the failure that occurred must have been inherent to the problem domain, rather than something that could have been avoided if I personally chose better”.

The phrase now gets used to mock such bandwagon behaviors: a CTO completely unfamiliar with Kubernetes, yet choosing it “because everyone else is using it”; an engineer picking a serialization format based on popularity while never having read the spec; etc.

The article isn’t suggesting that anyone actually be fired. It is, however, critical of people choosing JSON due to familiarity/popularity, without any critical thought involved in choice (and bandwagon fallacy does not count as critical thought).