The constant search for something that never comes
As team leader working with web based technology, I must always be attempt to what’s new in the market and what becomes obsolete. In any market that’s essentially true, but in technology it happens so fast that we loose track of everything and our judgment is usually affected by what today is known as “hype”.
People are always questioning me: Why aren’t we using (choose the hype you want)?
Since I joined this market, I’ve seen a few revolutions that transformed the market itself. I could say some of the most important ones were:
- the Web 2.0 movement;
- the launch of iPhone and iPad;
- the Internet of Things (IoT);
- the social data revolution.
Now that you’ve reach this point you may be thinking about many other things that for you may have impact in technology market. First, let me explain my point of view before you start writing your own paper about how stupid this text looks.
I’ve seen lots of new technologies and techniques appear in web along all those years — many of them just disappeared as fast as they appeared. Many of them seemed revolutionary, but the fact is that being revolutionary isn’t something that guarantee that it will continuously be used and applied everywhere. It strictly depends on purpose and result. It didn’t mean that you can’t use something that seems to be the key to solve all of your problems, but it also didn’t mean that you won’t have any side effect using a new technology.
I always wait a little bit to adopt something that’s presented as the ultimate solution for something. The fact is that everything has pros and cons. No mater how good something looks like, at the end, there’s always a situation where something doesn’t work as its purpose — believe me, it happens more often than you think.
A good example is the hype of SCRUM — it has been presented as the ultimate solution for software project management. No other framework or alternative methodology seemed to be competitive enough, in the next years only SCRUM would remain, they said. The whole software industry and also the traditional industries were applying the famous framework that promises agility at a glance. Nevertheless, the miracle of agility became so complex, so full of ceremonies and reports, that the original idea of agility that has been discussed at least a decade after SCRUM in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, was definitely lost. Don’t you believe in me? See what Dave Thomas thinks about it in his famous article Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility).
Another example of technology that seemed revolutionary at the time it has appeared was NodeJS. Imagine a language that runs in back-end but uses the same language syntax that browsers can read? During the first moments of NodeJS I remember people saying:
It’s the end of PHP, Ruby or Java in web development — people will now write front-end and back-end using the same language!
After a few years, I see that NodeJS is only another option, among many other languages in the market. And that’s essentially the true about everything in technology market — purpose and result. NodeJS may look like Javascript, but both are definitely different. Even though grapefruit and orange seem similar, they didn’t taste not even closer to each other.
The fact is that the people in technology are by definition early adopters. Honestly, I like it, but I know what it means (and I think you should too). It has pros and cons, as everything in our life. If I choose eating pizza everyday, the pleasure comes with a risk of an early dead and I must be aware of it when I decide to eat pizza every single day of my life.
I honestly understand that sometimes something looks revolutionary, and I really wish it is indeed. But in reality, I’ve seen much more failures than success when something is created and meant to be revolutionary. The revolution depends that people adopt it due to its purpose and the result they want to accomplish with their choices. It’s a trade-off where the pros must always overcome the cons.
If you really want to use the ultimate solution for something, first be sure it has a purpose that fits to yours, and be sure it will solve the problems you have — the results you want to reach matters more than anything else. Otherwise, you’ll be constantly searching for something that never comes.
