Boring Technology Ruins Innovation: Go, Chaos!
October 25, 2024
Jonathan E. Magen is an experienced computer scientist and he writes a blog called Yonkeltron. He recently posted, “Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement.” After a brief anecdote about highway repair that wasn’t hindered because of bureaucracy and the repair crew a new material to speed up the job, Magen got to thinking about the current state of tech.
He thinks it is boring.
Magen supports tech teams being allocated budgets to adopt old technology. The montage of “don’t fix what’s not broken” comes to mind, but sometimes newer is definitely better. He relates that it is problematic if tech teams have too much technology or solution, but there’s also the problem if the one-size-fits all solution no longer works. It’s like having a document that can only be opened by Microsoft Office and you don’t have the software. It’s called a monoculture with a single point of failure. Tech nerds and philosophers have names for everything!
Magen bemoans that a boring tech environment is a buzzkill. He then shares this “happy thoughts”:
“A second negative effect is the chilling of innovation. Creating a better way of doing things definitionally requires deviation from existing practices. If that is too heavily disincentivized by “engineering standards”, then people don’t feel they have enough freedom to color outside the lines here and there. Therefore, it chills innovation in company environments where good ideas could, conceivably, come from anywhere. Put differently, use caution so as not to silence your pioneers.
Another negative effect is the potential to cause stagnation. In this case, devotion to boring tech leads to overlooking better ways of doing things. Trading actual improvement and progress for “the devil you know” seems a poor deal. One of the main arguments in favor of boring tech is operability in the polycontext composed of predictability and repairability. Despite the emergence of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), I think that this highlights a troubling industry trope where we continually underemphasize, and underinvest in, production operations.”
Necessity is the mother of invention, but boring is the killer of innovation. Bring on chaos.
Whitney Grace, October 25, 2024
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