Yesterday I talked about the fact that as software developers, we should be prepared for change.
But of course, there is the other extreme as well. Self-taught semi-professionals missing real project experience as well as the feedback of more adept peers. Those who jump on the bandwagon of every hype, but do so in a fundamentally flawed way.
Like the guys who took the "a real man writes his own web framework"-joke for serious, and invested several man-years in a doomed attempt to create a chimera that combined web user interface components and object-relational mapping (and by "combine" I mean tight coupling, you bet) - just because they didn't like Struts or Hibernate, and quote: "Java Server Faces are still in Beta". They also didn't like the Java Collections API, so they wrote their own (interface-compatible) implementation.
Another developer was so convinced of webservices and any other technology that he could possibly apply that he suggested to compile report layouts into .NET assemblies, store those assemblies in database BLOBS and download them to the intranet(!) client using webservices (byte-arrays serialized over XML). Need to say more?
