In an interview I had for an internship, the interviewer brought up the idea of choosing boring technology, because organisations only have a few innovation coins to spend. Innovation coins are the unconventional/non-de-facto technologies you choose, processes you adopt as an organisation building a piece of software. This could be using Nix as a package manager, or choosing remote work pre-covid. They are probably quite weird and have their own quirks that you are going to be spending a lot of time solving its unique issues as you use them. Boring technology on the other hand are those that are known to work well for a specific problem. They have documentation, good support, and you can rely on them to get the job done. Though the size of commitment for each varies, each organisation only has a few innovation coins to spend. This is a consequence of resources being limited. So organisations must choose wisely on which innovation coins to choose, and it better be an investment that pays off well, given their specific set of problems.
This thinking can be applied to individuals’ lives for those that have a few too many things they want to do. Everyone only has 24 hours in a day and (at least at this moment) a finite lifespan. Some time needs to be spent to keep yourself functioning like sleep, eating, exercise. Some time needs to be spent on activities to gain resources like money, time. Some things can only be done during a specific time period like reproduction. Some things have a peak performance age like short-distance running.
If the goal is to be a working software engineer, your strongest technologies should probably not be Haskell, Nix, OCaml, and Zig. You should probably spend most of your time on boring stuff that is more hireable. But you could learn Nix out of interest, and it may even open up opportunities that are otherwise impossible.
This post is stating the obvious but we should be keenly aware of the limitations in resources we have. We most likely can’t spend it all on “weird” things if the aim is to succeed at your goal (unless your goal is to be weird for the sake of it). Most of our attention should probably be devoted to boring stuff that is proven to work just fine.