Over the years, there have been many trends in software development that teams and organisations embrace wholeheartedly as a solution to their challenges. Functional programming! Microservices! Serverless! GraphQL! While all of these technologies are extremely innovative and powerful, none of them are silver bullets for solving the complexities that come with building software. We often get a bit blinded by a shiny new paradigm or technology and fail to truly evaluate the tradeoffs we are making along the way. In this talk I will draw on my 16 year journey as an international software engineering leader to provide some real world examples of challenges my teams faced due to eagerly adopting these trends. I will share the wisdom I’ve gained through these experiences and my recommendations for what to pause and consider before jumping on board to the next new language, technology, or paradigm.