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Comment by rcoder | Hacker News Reader

It's totally reasonable to say you wouldn't want to work in a company that prioritized unsurprising, proven technology over novelty and in-house solutions. That's a far cry from it being unilaterally a "terribly place to work" headed by a "moron".

Some programmers are more motivated by solving business problems than they are by inventing and adopting shiny new technologies. At this point in my career I'm definitely more interested in applying proven languages and systems to novel product problems than I am inventing new frameworks and debugging cutting-edge runtimes.

So: different strokes for different folks. Insulting people who disagree on issues for which there's more than one answer is just unnecessarily snarky IMHO.

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I'd add that some programmers wish to build their exciting new technology upon a strong foundation rather than sand. Sometimes bleeding edge technology requires a non-trivial amount of work to keep up with breaking changes in return for something that can be obtained another way (isolation via docker vs traditional virtualization).

Sometimes boring technology choices are a sign that the programmers are innovating in their actual technology rather than blindly adopting whatever they see in blog posts.

> Some programmers are more motivated by solving business problems than they are by inventing and adopting shiny new technologies.

My stance isn't really about shiny new tech. I find flavor of the week stuff about as annoying as anyone.

Rather, my reaction is this is basically a puff piece. Fair enough, but as a professional reading about the supposed virtues of this guys "philosophy", my reaction is that I wouldn't want to work in an environment where I would be treated with so little esteem as etsy seems to regard their engineers. Maybe that's harsh, but that's my impression.

Here's an example of what I mean: "Shadow IT, that idea that employees can and will provision their own software (because they can), is everywhere because IT is powerless to stop it. Elliott-McCrea, however, is adamant that his company has no patience for freelancing when it comes to software and he claims it’s not happening." As a programmer, this strikes me as ridiculous -- I use non-company-sanctioned software to do my job all the time and nobody bats an eye (ie, text editors, graphics software, etc). If their trust of developers is so low that they won't even let them choose their own software, what does it say about how much respect they have for them?

If this were an objective analysis I wouldn't be so mean, but given that it's a puff piece, I don't see any reason not to be blunt about how toxic I think that CTO's ideas are.

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