It’s been annoying me for years — the incessant, knee-jerk reaction in tech culture to dismiss any and all hardware, software, or technology that doesn’t contain every new feature and cater to every possible need. It’s a mentality where everything must be the one true thing™, or it’s useless.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

You’ve no doubt seen the quote before, because it so succinctly captures the way we, as tech inclined people, are so quick to judge products on nothing more than a spec sheet (or just rampant speculation). Products are now almost always ‘reviewed‘ before a production or even pre-production unit has ever touched a reviewers hands. It’s a culture that has created a “feature cold war” that’s morphed the electronics industry into a first-to-market, stuff-it-with-cool-shit, and get-it-out-the-door-first mentality. Only a few companies buck the trend, and deliver complete experiences and useable technology.

Of course, it’s petty to critique the electronics industry — it’s common knowledge that it’s always been a bit of a little-boys playroom, and the fact that the Internet has amplified this childishness is hardly noteworthy. What’s interesting is how this trend has permeated into the realm of internet professionals, and how it tweaks our collective minds a bit more than it should.

Why not?

The most obvious way that ‘gear geek’ culture has hurt the field of web professionals is the constant, pressing fear that whatever solution one finds to solve a problem is immediately up for scrutiny from the peanut gallery — especially those with little to no familiarity with the issue. If you use WordPress as a CMS, someone will ask why didn’t you use ExpressionEngine. If you develop a web app in Ruby, they’ll wonder what grudge you have against Django. Hell, some will even wonder why’d you use anything other than Smalltalk speaking JSON to a ‘sharded DB cluster that will totally scale to millions of users. If you build anything on the web, you’ve built it wrong to someone. More often than not, they’ll let you know.

Worse, this is even happening in real life. Yibbers.

The fear

As a professional, it should be easy to block this chatter out, but it’s not — being a web professional is all about talking incessant shop. On blogs, chat, twitter, and in person — it’s how our skills get passed around, and how we learn about new technologies. If you don’t have your ears up, you’ll fall behind.

So you have to listen to all of it, the good and the bad. And more often than not, there’s a strong ‘bad signal’ of “oh I’d do it this way’ers,” which leads us all to fear, uncertainty and doubt. We start to question our own confidence, and often make poor choices based on what might ‘seem’ to be a good technology. I know I’ve done it.

Fight back

The best way to avoid ‘the fear’ is to be confident and knowledgeable about what you’re doing. You know what works best for you through experience. Personal experience matters more than anything — if you’re not sure, then you need to do more work to be sure. Experiment and learn away from client projects, and know as much as you can about the tools you use. Know the limits of your solution, and plan to get around them. Every piece of software or technology is limited in some respect, so it’s best to have a plan if that situation ever affects you.

The sort version: don’t early adopt. Use tools and technology that you have experience using successfully, and tools that others have used successfully as well. Filter out the noise on the net for those useful voices that help you use the tools you’re comfortable using. You’ll have your knowledge and a community to fall back on when you’re stuck. When you need to learn something new, grow you knowledge slowly, and don’t look for or expect perfection.

The most important thing too keep in mind is that all this technology is useless without us. We make it all work, and we feed it problems to solve. The most difficult issues are rarely technical, they’re human.