Beware of the Silver Bullet Syndrome
Do you really want your professional identity to be a tool stack?
Technology job postings often describe the need for passionate people, who work hard and strongly advocate their ideas. After all, Steve Jobs was passionate so maybe that is a trait of successful people!
In the data engineering and analytics world, passionate people often have a strong opinion about using a certain platform. We all have encountered this person: the one who zealously promotes Apache Spark, or pushes to have all data wrangling work done in Alteryx. There is a strong emphasis on the tool and not so much on the problem/solution pairing.
Sometimes this behavior is driven by the desire for standardization and to simplify hiring, which is certainly valid. But more often than not, I have seen people zealously advocate a tool simply because they were passionate about it or, even worse, built their professional identity around it.
To put it simply, it is never a good idea to build your professional identity around a tool. Tools and applications come and go, and what is hot today may be deprecated tomorrow. This alone should give you reason to pause before you advocate a technology too quickly. Ask anyone who has done JavaScript.
Another reason it is a bad idea to over-advocate a tool is best described by the expression: “when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” More than once in my career, I had difficult problems land on my lap that required highly unconventional solutions. While I had thrilled customers, I sometimes had a colleague who wondered why I did not use a preferred/conventional tool to solve it. I had to point out the irony of him asking for a conventional solution to an unconventional problem.
Hadi Hariri at JetBrains best described this behavior as the Silver Bullet Syndrome (video below), where we expect a single tool to solve all our problems only to chase the next one when we are disappointed.
Do not fall victim to Silver Bullet Syndrome and become too passionate about a platform or tool. Instead, stand back. Be impartial and objective. Realize different tools may be warranted for different types of problems. Granted, you should strive to standardize tools as much as you can in your workplace, but not at the cost of efficacy.
Do you really want your professional identity to simply be a tool stack? Would you rather your resume say “I know SQL, MongoDB, and Tableau” or “I am an adaptable professional who can navigate ambiguous environments, overcome departmental barriers, and provide technical insights to maximize data value for an organization”? Build your professional identity in skills, problem-solving, and adaptability… not a fleeting technology.
