Signs Of Suspicious Tech Fads

Signs that a new tech idea is oversold or immature:

• Dire predictions given if you don't use it. "Use <x> or your code will grow into a viney tangle and strangle everybody alive!" Of course, code tends to do that anyhow, with or without newfangled gizmos or ideas.

• Appeal to arrogance: "This is what smart people use."

• Suddenly appears on many magazine covers or lead web articles.

• People who are skeptical are immediately labelled as Luddites.

• It is buggy and incomplete or lacks basic road-testing. Example: Java and JavaApplets? in 1997. (Whether Java is better now is not the point: it wasn't ready in 1997.)

• Examples given of its use assume over-simplistic or irrelevant scenarios. Example: grabs a database record(s) and formats it to the screen based on the type of data returned. "See, no coding needed!" However, it offers no easy way to intervene with app code to tweak and massage the result set before display (a common need).

• Overly-nice aesthetics. Something that has too much pretty usually means that somebody is overcompensating for shortcomings. Something new usually needs a lot of care and fixing, which is usually in short supply around release dates. Thus, if the aesthetics contain all the care, then real fixes probably had to take a back seat. An overly-dressed sales team is a variation of this.
  • I've seen this work the other way too, though. At least in some fields, it's often the case that good craftspeople care very much about presenting their product nicely as well as making it functional. In these fields, poor aesthetics often goes with poor underlying code. --MarnenLaibowKoser, 20 Dec 2012

• PointyHairedBosses fall for it quickly.
  • Variation: sales team avoids the techies, preferring to talk to managers.

• Scope: Niche is vague, broad, or ever-changing: "It is a database, a GUI, and an operating system!"
  • Possible exception: Emacs? :-)

• Incorporates other common buzzwords or fads. Adding ExtensibleMarkupLanguage is a common example.

• Uses faddish terms in its name. "Turbo" was common in the 80's, "Visual" or "Object" in the 90's, and "X" or "X-treme" and "iSomething" in the naughts (00's). Being named such a way usually indicates that marketers are behind the product instead of techies. (Sometimes the first instance is the real deal, but copycats overload the name.)

• The SoftwareEngineeringInstitute endorses it.

• A solution looking for a problem: It "solves" something or does something that is not your highest priority. It tries to connect every other problem to the one problem it solves. Example: "If you use our handy-dandy code reference grapher, you can spot all your mistakes in one glance."

Of course, some of this is applicable to hype in general, not just tech fads.

{I vaguely remember an existing page like this, but cannot find it. It is similar to AlarmBellPhrase.}