>
You’ll lose your best developersSo what? If you have paying customers and the software "works" this isn't a huge downfall. New, young and challenged developers will gladly follow in the foot steps of seasoned coders before them.
> Recruiting will get harder
This is a problem for every company with developers. As long as you have paying customers, recruiting isn't as big of a problem as people make it out to be. Is this a problem for places like Google and Facebook? Sure. For you start-up, probably not. Software challenges tend to trail off towards the latter part of the software's life cycle. If there is a new piece of functionality required then smart developers will simply find the tools, frameworks, libraries, they need to solve that problem. They don't need this dictated to them.
> Productivity won’t improve
You also are inherently decreasing their productivity by teasing them with new technologies that may never be used. You can also clearly quantify their loss in productivity when they spend time on new technologies. I'd prefer to measure the measurable and manage that, rather than half guess a "innovation debt" that I'll never be able to manage properly.
> Your software will get stale
Are your customers still paying? Good, get over this aspect then. Software that doesn't change always goes stale.
It happens when the team is too busy putting out fires and finishing up features to keep up to date with advances in languages, frameworks, libraries, tools and processes.
What about the increased costs (real actual currency HR costs) that are included in constantly taking your resources off the software maintenance and delivery for a product/service that real people are paying for. There are some serious implications with letting people's innovative brains wander too far when given a specific task to accomplish. This is why hackathons and "FedEx" days are so popular. It's a mutual agreement between employer and employee that says: "You are allowed to hack something together with new exciting technology but I cannot guarantee it will reach the production stack"
I think this idea of innovation debt is a clear non-problem for me and most web based startups in my situation.
So what? If you have paying customers and the software "works" this isn't a huge downfall. New, young and challenged developers will gladly follow in the foot steps of seasoned coders before them.
> Recruiting will get harder
This is a problem for every company with developers. As long as you have paying customers, recruiting isn't as big of a problem as people make it out to be. Is this a problem for places like Google and Facebook? Sure. For you start-up, probably not. Software challenges tend to trail off towards the latter part of the software's life cycle. If there is a new piece of functionality required then smart developers will simply find the tools, frameworks, libraries, they need to solve that problem. They don't need this dictated to them.
> Productivity won’t improve
You also are inherently decreasing their productivity by teasing them with new technologies that may never be used. You can also clearly quantify their loss in productivity when they spend time on new technologies. I'd prefer to measure the measurable and manage that, rather than half guess a "innovation debt" that I'll never be able to manage properly.
> Your software will get stale
Are your customers still paying? Good, get over this aspect then. Software that doesn't change always goes stale.
It happens when the team is too busy putting out fires and finishing up features to keep up to date with advances in languages, frameworks, libraries, tools and processes.
What about the increased costs (real actual currency HR costs) that are included in constantly taking your resources off the software maintenance and delivery for a product/service that real people are paying for. There are some serious implications with letting people's innovative brains wander too far when given a specific task to accomplish. This is why hackathons and "FedEx" days are so popular. It's a mutual agreement between employer and employee that says: "You are allowed to hack something together with new exciting technology but I cannot guarantee it will reach the production stack"
I think this idea of innovation debt is a clear non-problem for me and most web based startups in my situation.