nepotism

Do you decide to use a certain technology because it is better or do you decide to use a certain technology because your company already is using this product and has some experience with it?

What is nepotism anyway?

From Wikipedia

Nepotism is favoritism granted in politics or business to relatives regardless of merit. The term originated with the assignment of nephews to cardinal positions by Catholic popes and bishops. Nepotism is found in the fields of politics, entertainment, business and religion.

Looking at that, we can then easily say that you picked technology A because you favor it, it is easier for you to use, you don’t have to learn another thing, even though the other technology might be better for the job. Maybe your shop standardized on a technology stack and you are not allowed to use anything else.

Luckily in my job I don’t have such restrictions, I can use SQL Server, if MongoDB is better we might use that and if Hadoop is the way to go then that is what we will use instead

What about you and your company, do you have a technology stack that has to be used or are you free to explore other technologies? Are there restrictive policies and standards in place that makes this very difficult. Of course picking something non standard can cause problems down the road, what if you decided to use Silverlight instead of HTML 5…guess who has a problem now?