It's fun to dive in and "modernize all the things" - and certainly you can learn a lot in the process (perhaps at the expense of the business).
I don't believe that the only reasonable alternative to that is to "choose boring tech" though. Like so many things in life, it's very contextual, and this is where you need someone with a lot of background and war wounds who can discern valuable improvements from yet-another-CADT-library-rewrite. Sometimes they're hard to differentiate from an old crusty cynic though.
I'm resistant to either pole - I think there's often a 'middle way', where you can leverage proven, high-quality software (think PostgreSQL) while still benefiting from modern approaches (pragmatic functional idioms, etc). I'm old enough to remember when the industry was generally more entrenched in ossified approaches - it definitely has its downsides too!
The hard part is when a (supposedly) proven technology turns out to be a turd. Much of the job of choosing good tech appears to be using heuristics to avoid low quality tech with good marketing. I'd love to have better tools to guide that problem!
I don't believe that the only reasonable alternative to that is to "choose boring tech" though. Like so many things in life, it's very contextual, and this is where you need someone with a lot of background and war wounds who can discern valuable improvements from yet-another-CADT-library-rewrite. Sometimes they're hard to differentiate from an old crusty cynic though.
I'm resistant to either pole - I think there's often a 'middle way', where you can leverage proven, high-quality software (think PostgreSQL) while still benefiting from modern approaches (pragmatic functional idioms, etc). I'm old enough to remember when the industry was generally more entrenched in ossified approaches - it definitely has its downsides too!
The hard part is when a (supposedly) proven technology turns out to be a turd. Much of the job of choosing good tech appears to be using heuristics to avoid low quality tech with good marketing. I'd love to have better tools to guide that problem!