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Comment by JaimeThompson | Hacker News Reader

To be fair I know of people in private industry who have said some of the exact same things. It isn't limited to just government employees.

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If you work for a modern software company (not a service company that sells software), and you honestly suggest Visual Source Safe, you'll get fired. There's just no reasonably intelligent reason to suggest it.

You practically have to assault someone in the break room to get fired from a government job.

But if your org is using $oldtech and some new person comes in recommending $newtech, you'll be in great company if you argue that $newtech sucks and you wish you could just keep using $oldtech.

Organizational inertia is definitely a thing, and technology trends do not move as quickly in all sectors.

But how good is $newtech really? Is it someone trying to screw over other older employees in the name of his job security? Is Mr. $newtech in touch with the salespeople hawking this product? Is he being incentivized to advocate for it? How many secondary changes will $newtech result in, and will they deliver so much more value as to justify the expense, inconvenience, retraining, and tears that will come from replacing $oldtech?

My guess is, in most circumstances, probably not

"New tech" lately feels more and more like whatever the next breed of inexperienced geeks decided to reinvent

Well, to move back from the abstraction, Visual Source Safe is truly awful, and you're never safe from it losing your code :)

Whatever your perspective on fad-chasing in software development, some things just suck down through the ages...

Would you get fired, or would people just assume you were being sarcastic?

> > honestly

The question isn't whether you honestly suggest it; the question is whether they believe you when you express sincerity.

I'd ask whether to set up the build pipeline for VB6 or ASMX Services, lol

You would not get fired. Probably everyone would forget you even said it.

If you want people in a company to be able to produce good ideas, they must have reasonable leeway to disagree or be contrarian.

I worked for a startup with ex-Microsoft management in the 1990s, so we used VSS. All joking aside, we actually did lose about a day's work to that pile of fun.

I'm told that at this point sales will quietly try to talk you out of buying it.

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