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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Fashion (which values novelty) is a major factor in web design, it stands to reason this preference would spill over to the underlying technical stack as well.

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I agree, but this has always stuck out as odd to me. Why is this so true even of the developers in web when people in something like C# are perfectly content using the established tools/frameworks they know year after year? I have seen sometimes seen this in the same person - someone who would never complain about using Entity Framework, but who is always pushing for the latest trend when working in the front end stack.

As someone who has changed the kind of work I do in my career I've had two very different experiences.

There is a web development culture. There was a pace of advancement for many years that helped shape this desire for newest shiniest stuff. Other ingredients such as chasing FAANG, VC money, and the general youth of the average web dev. Salaries chasing talent due to the online boom and corporate policies not adjusting to keep talent, thus needing to do resume building for the next job hop because it's going to happen in less than 2 years.

Even C# isn't completely immune to trendchasing, although you're right that it's less. Maybe it could also be due to how much effort and money is spent promoting novelty --- and certainly for companies like Google, change is their weapon for fighting competition.

Y’know, I’d argue that C# may be the worst when it comes to trend-chasing — for better or for worse, the language’s a giant toy box that lets you develop in very expressive, not to say idiosyncratic, ways.

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