What developers think when they hear 'aggressive timeline': <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ</a><p>What managers think: <a href="https://youtu.be/-TKjwblp1XI?t=1373" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/-TKjwblp1XI?t=1373</a><p>Point being, nobody gets a documentary about themselves made for delivering against a boring deadline.
I think that "boring" is being used here as shorthand for well known and predictable, which are attributes that I would rate highly when developing a platform or trying to work on a novel problem.<p>I believe a contributor to why choosing boring is hard is that often the problem we encounter in software is not new or unique, but may still the be first time a team/company is attempting it. Therefore, unless you know your company has the patience for unforeseen technical difficulties, and that your team has the skillset to overcome any fundamental challenges posed by the technology chosen, even if the technology is a better fit for a problem, it may not be a good match for the organisation.
This is coming from the perspective of someone working in platform engineering. The further down the stack you are, the more conservative (aka boring) you have to be, because the blast radius increases. Quoting another great post [0] on this: "The risk profile for infrastructure is different than the applications that run on top of that infrastructure."<p>[0] <a href="http://cloudscaling.com/blog/devops/continuous-delusion-at-the-infrastructure-layer/" rel="nofollow">http://cloudscaling.com/blog/devops/continuous-delusion-at-t...</a>
What I find interesting is that the bullet points at the end are qualities that really good Product/Project Managers have. When engineers have these skills they become a real force multiplier for their company
Boring doesn't work if the solution you've picked has flaws that the new technology addresses out-of-the-box.<p>You'll constantly get into arguments about why we're not deploying the new upcoming thing that obviously fixes the issue.<p>At some point you'll need to switch over anyways, its better to get production battle experience by trying the new tech early and rolling it out where it makes sense.<p>It avoids internal factions and the "shadow infrastructure" that was mentioned.