That’s not entirely unrational behaviour. Some of the enterprise resistance is pure fear of change, but a lot comes from the fact that they’re addressing a different problem set:
1. A lot of legacy tech to support.
2. An insane number of integration points.
3. High sustainability requirement (e.g. can we hire and train 100 developers to work on this now? will that still be true in 10 years?).
Individuals, small orgs, and startups can experiment cheaply. Try golang? No problem! For enterprise, big government, etc., a failure can easily cost $100M+, so they reasonably let the small orgs experiment first, and wait for a consensus (and a big labour and support pool) to emerge.
My advice to bigger business and government customers is to be boring (not obsolete) in their technology choices, except in their one area of specialisation.
For example, if you’re an insurance company, go crazy experimenting with innovative new actuarial models and tech to support them, but maybe don’t implement your core system on top of julia, or stick your whole customer database into a blockchain.
I think it is intrinsic to large bureaucratic organizations that mistakes cost you more (career-wise) than successes, even if the opposite is true for the organization as a whole. This leads to trouble admitting a mistake, so once you’ve said “No” too many times, it is hard to be convinced to change your mind.
John Hardy Developer 
Just had the 1st GigE switch at work days back. Being able to shoot files into the NAS 10x faster was a revelation.
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That’s not entirely unrational behaviour. Some of the enterprise resistance is pure fear of change, but a lot comes from the fact that they’re addressing a different problem set:
1. A lot of legacy tech to support.
2. An insane number of integration points.
3. High sustainability requirement (e.g. can we hire and train 100 developers to work on this now? will that still be true in 10 years?).
Individuals, small orgs, and startups can experiment cheaply. Try golang? No problem! For enterprise, big government, etc., a failure can easily cost $100M+, so they reasonably let the small orgs experiment first, and wait for a consensus (and a big labour and support pool) to emerge.
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The green line should be curving sharply down at the right hand end.
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My advice to bigger business and government customers is to be boring (not obsolete) in their technology choices, except in their one area of specialisation.
For example, if you’re an insurance company, go crazy experimenting with innovative new actuarial models and tech to support them, but maybe don’t implement your core system on top of julia, or stick your whole customer database into a blockchain.
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I think it is intrinsic to large bureaucratic organizations that mistakes cost you more (career-wise) than successes, even if the opposite is true for the organization as a whole. This leads to trouble admitting a mistake, so once you’ve said “No” too many times, it is hard to be convinced to change your mind.
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I’m currently living this.
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-1 😦
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