Employers demand expertise in the Shiny New Thing™. We make a mad dash to learn juuust enough about Shiny New Thing™ so we can find a way to less-than-gracefully shoehorn it into our stack. Once our resume has Shiny New Thing™ added to it in some embellished manner, we start the cycle all over again at Next Employer™.

Working across the tech industry for several years has made me realize something very sobering: generally speaking, we hate our jobs. We want to do better, learn more, stay relevant. But we’re terrified that present & future employers won’t give us a second look unless our resumes are chock-full of the Shiny New Thing™-of-the-week technologies. And sadly, they’re not entirely wrong.

The cycle is maddening, and no party involved really benefits in the long term. No one likes “boring technology” anymore. But what if we did again? What if we all found a collaborative way to appreciate safe & sane tech stack options, stop chasing the next new thing for the sake of itself, and actually deliver business value over buzzwords? This talk will explore learnings & observations of this phenomenon, and postulate on what we can do as an industry to just… chill out already.