How do you feel about those companies that try to use the newest technologies?

Question

Two days ago I got a suggestion to pass test of HTML 5 (I am looking for a job). I was shocked because modern web browsers don't support some features or support its partially. Other side of situation: I worked for a some company that still using SQL Server 2000 (now is available 2005, 2008) on her production. So my question is: how do you feel about those companies that try to use newest technologies? The newest is evil of good?

SUMMARY

We continue using old technology because of it predictability (this applies to critical systems in particular). A lack of productivity, low expansiveness, difficulties of deployment, implementation, testing of old technology are picking us to choice a new one. Even if we know that a new technology can be unsupported and now it is untested, raw and has low documentation, simple human curiosity is pushing us to use it. Any way we should be oriented on our target audience, people which are using our IT solutions. Other important things should be taken into account:

• time to implement
• time and cost to learn
• ease of deployment, implementation, testing
• faster and easier to use

Answer 1

About a month ago the W3C released a statement saying the community at large should hold off on HTML5. The reasons they gave boil down to the following:

• Browser compatibility.
• Non-standard formats (video especially).

Identifying your target audience and coding to them is more important then if you're using the "latest and greatest" piece of technology.

If you're working on some bleeding edge reporting engine for real time statistics, you can probably afford to use WebSockets (or FlashSockets) and remove IE 6/7, FF <3, Safari < 5, and Opera from your "supported browser" list. Banks and other large commercial entities used to require IE for site use. I remember firing up IE 5.5 (Mac) for certain websites.

If your target market is broad you may have to dig up support for FF 2 and IE 6. It all depends on what you're doing.

Answer 2

Always picking new technologies is an attempt to offset the old technologies used. Sometimes it works to their advantage while other times it backfires, because it ends up not being supported and basically being a dead end technology.

Rather than picking a technology because it's new, that should simply be one of many factors in choosing it. Among other factors include time to learn, time to implement it, and ease of deployment.

Answer 3

Whether to accept a new technology should be a business question, not a coolness factor question. Some questions I would ask:

• Does it improve productivity(on the programming side, I'm thinking of databases and IDEs)?
• Will it make our product easier to use or faster?
• Will training for it cost less the the savings will be for using it?

You'll probably notice that questions often won't have definate answers for a couple of years. For some companies, most notably web-based or sometimes game developers, can afford to take a risk on a new technology. Others, especially those with privacy obligations, can't. They would need to wait and see if the tech comes out to be reliable and useful.

Answer 4

I've worked for people who want to use the newest technologies simply because they were the newest and the environment tends to be a disaster. After a few years, the infrastructure becomes a mishmash of unsupported technologies that faded from active use and development.

Software needs to be supported. I once counted five Java MVC frameworks in use at one company with 15 developers. Shudder. How could that be supported?

Answer 5

Learning it could still be valuable and may show employers that you are interested in your own field. It doesn't mean you'll use it in the next project you have.

Answer 6

This depends largely on what the technology is being used for. For example, I try to use all of the latest commercial GUI control packages I can, because they are sleek and the user immediately sees them and says "Cool!". On the other hand, I am not about to write a huge business application in the Google Go language, because it is largely untested and I don't want my users to be the testers. Not to mention, I have no idea if it will really take off and be supported for the 5 years that my app needs to run.

I would just say that having a robust knowledge base online is probably the largest factor for me. I am currently considering Windows WF 4 for a large app, and although it does everything I need it to, the online knowledge base is practically nonexistent, which could make for some scary bugs down the road which no one has found a fix for yet.

Answer 7

So my question is: how do you feel about those companies that try to use newest technologies?

How do I feel? Depends. Usually, and especially in the case of HTML5, I think they are fools. Downright, outright fools. The only thing for sure in a technology that's not even finalized yet is it WILL change. Possibly breaking everything done in the process.

Now it's a different story if it's done for personal use. You wanna redo your own site 5 times because the rules have changed, that's your prerogative.

Having said all that, I certainly wouldn't think any less of you for looking into it... Regardless of how I feel about it, it is most definitely a buzz-word technology. Might even help you get past the HR firewall.

That's my two cents on the topic. Take it how you will.

Answer 8

Depends how they're doing it, and largely what type of project they are working on.

If they're developing for internal projects with a fairly low quality bar, and they can contribute back to the technology to help keep it alive (either with testing, development or cold hard cash), and they can back out if it all goes Pete Tong, then great, why shouldn't they use the latest and greatest?

However, if it's a critical system for a client who will eat them alive for every single error, or the project has a chance of dying and leaving them with a lot of work to switch to an alternative, then they are fools.

The latest bleeding-edge techs which always have more issues, they always have a chance of falling flat, and there can always be something else even cooler just round the corner.

Answer 9

I Hate Them

I can write better, faster code with textpad than most of those yahoos can write with there fancy programs.

They spend way too much time trying to figure out why the code generated by the machine doesn't do what they wanted it to do.

Code from scratch... that's whay I say.