Engineering notes
Engineering note 021

Choosing boring technology on purpose

Photo: Jakub Żerdzicki / Unsplash

Technology selection is usually discussed as a question of capability. In practice it is a question of who will be holding it in eighteen months, and what they will know.

A tool your team can operate confidently outperforms a better tool they cannot. That includes debugging, upgrades, hiring, and the availability of answers when something fails in a way the documentation does not cover.

This is not an argument against new technology. It is an argument for spending novelty where it earns something specific — a real constraint you cannot meet otherwise — and taking the well-understood option everywhere else. Novelty has an operational cost and a budget, like anything else.

When I recommend against something, the reasoning is usually this: the proposal is defensible technically and expensive to operate for the team that will inherit it.

Spend novelty where it buys you a constraint you cannot otherwise meet. Everywhere else, take the option your team can debug.

The corollary is to write the decision down, including what would make you reverse it. A choice with recorded reasoning can be revisited; a choice defended by habit cannot.

Working on something in this territory?Discuss your project →
More notes