Why sharing new tools makes you a target and why you should do it anyway

If you’ve ever been the first person on your team to try a new tool, framework, or platform; congratulations, you’ve probably been blamed for someone else’s failure.

That’s the Innovators Penalty.

It’s what happens when you find something genuinely better, share it with enthusiasm, and then watch someone misuse it, ignore your advice, and come back to tell you the tool is garbage and by extension, so are you.

My experiences

Years ago, I started building with AWS Lambda before most people understood what “functions as a service” even meant. It was eye opening. Fast to deploy, scalable, cheap. Once I figured out the workflow that worked for me (Serverless Framework), it changed how I built on AWS.

I’d share what I learned at my company and with others in the community, encouraging others to give it a try, and share how I used it.

There was a wave of curious adopters. They’d skip the framework, deploy manually through the AWS console, hit dependency errors, permission errors, or timeouts. They’d show up to my desk saying, “I have a bone to pick with you. Lambda is a disaster.”

CDK vs. CloudFormation: The Déjà Vu

Later, while working at AWS, I had déjà vu with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). I jumped on CDK early and was able to work circles around teams using CloudFormation. They were still hand-writing YAML templates, and I was shipping infrastructure as real, testable code in a fraction of the time.

I loudly advocated for deploying AWS infrastructure using CDK, but once again the moment something required a learning curve, people bailed. “It’s too complex.” “It’s too new.” “I’ll stick with what I know.”

The irony? Every person who complained eventually ended up migrating anyway, just years later; slower, with less context, and no head start.

The Innovators Penalty, Defined

The Innovators Penalty is what happens when you raise the standard.

You take someone from a technology/tool/framework that’s a 2 out of 10 and give them something that’s an 8. But instead of celebrating the 6-point leap, they obsess over the missing 2 points between 8 and 10.

Or worse, they give something a half-assed try, it doesn’t perform as they expected, then write it off (and often the person who advocated for it).

They move the goalposts. Suddenly, what was a huge improvement “isn’t perfect.”

Welcome to Goalpost Drift, also known as the 8-to-10 Fallacy.

It’s not new. Every major technology went through this. Here are a few examples:

Git vs SVN

The 2->8 leap: SVN required a centralized server, branching was painfully slow, and merge conflicts were a nightmare. Git gave you distributed repos, instant branching, and vastly better merging.

The 8->10 complaint: “Git’s commands are too confusing. Why can’t I just use revision numbers like SVN?”

You went from merge hell to merge sanity, but people obsessed over memorizing git rebase -i.

Docker vs VMs

The 2->8 leap: Before Docker, deployments were a mess of environment drift, complex setup scripts, and the infamous “works on my machine” excuse. Docker gave you consistent environments everywhere.

The 8->10 complaint: “I can’t SSH into it like a real server” or “Where’s the GUI?”

You eliminated an entire class of bugs, but people wanted to treat containers like VMs.

TypeScript vs JavaScript

The 2->8 leap: JavaScript gave you runtime errors, zero IDE support, and refactoring by prayer. TypeScript caught errors at compile time, gave you amazing autocomplete, and made refactoring much easier.

The 8->10 complaint: “I have to write type definitions” or “It’s not real JavaScript.”

You went from debugging production to catching bugs in your editor, but people complained about a few extra characters.

The pattern repeats: a massive improvement arrives, and instead of gratitude, you get nitpicking about what’s missing (and didn’t exist before).

The New Frontier: AI Coding Assistants

These days, the Innovators Penalty is playing out with AI coding assistants.

Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, you name it. These tools are absurdly powerful in the right hands and absolutely destructive in the wrong ones.

The pattern is predictable:

Someone opens an AI IDE, pastes a vague prompt, gets junk code, and declares, “AI coding assistants are useless.”

Meanwhile, the developers who invest the time to actually learn how to drive these tools are shipping features at 5× the speed, minimum.

This is the Innovators Penalty on steroids - because AI tools magnify skill differences. The careless get burned faster, and the competent pull further ahead.

And that’s the opportunity.

When skeptics sneer and declare these tools “unreliable,” innovators quietly eat their lunch. They build, ship, and iterate while the doubters are writing LinkedIN hot takes on “why AI isn’t ready yet.”

Every new wave of technology starts this way. The difference this time is that the curve is steeper. The rewards for early mastery are enormous, and the penalties for hesitation are brutal.

Why Do People Do This?

Because change can threaten egos.

It’s easier to roll your eyes and nitpick the flaws than to say, “I don’t know this yet, and learning new things is hard”.

Organizations make this worse by quietly rewarding those who blend in and side-eyeing those who suggest change.

The result? Teams that fear risk and cultures that quietly punish the curious.

Leadership has a duty to break that cycle - to protect the builders who try new things and to normalize intelligent failure.

The Real Risk: Irrelevance

The risk isn’t in trying new tools. It’s in refusing to.

Yes, advocating for something new puts a target on your back. You’ll get blamed, mocked, second-guessed.

But if you stop exploring, you stop growing. You stop being valuable.

That’s the real penalty; irrelevance.

A Note to the Builders

If you’re the kind of person who experiments, learns, and shares, keep going.

Expect pushback. Expect eye-rolls. Expect people to misuse what you share and blame you for it.

That’s the price of being early.

Wear the Innovators Penalty like a badge. You’re not wrong, you’re just ahead.

And to the skeptics: the world’s moving forward with or without you.