Seems like an odd caveat. Why would you pick something nobody on the team is good at? Who made that silly decision to begin with. I'd expect at least one person is good/familiar with the language chosen.
> Why would you pick something nobody on the team is good at?
This is more likely than you may think...
"I want to learn Ember.js, so even though I'm proficient at using Angular.js let's write everything in Ember.js instead. Then we can spend months chasing our tail learning all of the 'Gotchas' of Ember.js. Also, just to make things interesting, let's use a bleeding-edge version of Ember.js. Also let's do this at a time when articles on Ember.js that are just 4 months old are already out-dated and no longer apply to the current codebase."
Though I doubt that a warning on HN will deter such people.
I'm sure that the investors in such ventures are thrilled at the idea of paying developers to spin their wheels for a few months in order to create material for a "lessons learned" blog post.
sometimes I get the impression that a large portion of software developers act like consumers in their professional lives. Find shiny, try shiny, discard for new shiny. Doesn't matter if it's a personal gadget or something the company is counting on.
Well, I've been in the situation where nobody knows any of the frameworks around to achieve your goal and you just kind of have to pick one and hope you're right so that's another possibility.
Well, that's a different can of worms than, "I have a tool in front of me that I know how to use and is an appropriate tool for the job, but I will consciously decide not to use it. This will cause me much grief."
I've worked at a couple of startups that failed for that reason. The CTO picked something he wanted to pad his resume with, rather than a good technical choice.
Fair enough. I seems like a terrible decision from the start. But to me that connects deeply with people shipping stuff. If you're all learning the intricacies of some new tech, you're probably not shipping as much as you could be.
Oh, I agree that it's a terrible decision, but people make horrible decisions all the time. Many times they won't even admit it was a bad decision in hindsight.
Resume-building, probably. Or else nobody on the team is familiar with any of the tools to accomplish the desired goal (e.g., you want to make a SPA and none of you have ever done it before).
