I wish smaller shops had some smaller role model to follow instead of your Facebooks or Googles. No, we don't need the same tools they use, because they use those tools to deal with deep organizational and technical complexity. If you don't have deep organizational complexity, and especially if you don't have separate data stores, you don't need microservices.

It’s exactly my philosophy in the small shop I founded, it’s a real struggle to educate both developers and clients.

It's easy to do, too. Just make boring software. C# is fine. SQL server is fine. A monolith is fine. That's it. (Replace with your favorite language.)

Making boring software is easy. Getting other people to pay for it is harder in a world where everything needs to be Kubernetes, React, AI or Blockchain.

Are you an agency? I'd love to hear your experience with this problem. As a contractor I find it very hard to find clients with "sane" stacks to work on. Even early stage companies nowadays (who would typically get contractors to build their MVP) seem to already settle on an overcomplicated mess despite their scale not warranting it. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

Yes we are an Agency, so we are fortunately able to choose the stack, but still have to convince (it hopefully gives us an edge on pricing). It’s a reality clients are looking for buzzwords because that’s what they hear and they want industry standard, cannot blame them. From what I see in our niche what we are choosing to do is the exception, so indeed I imagine it must be hard as a contractor to find simple stacks to work on.