As technical lead on some projects whenever someone comes will cool idea X, my question usually boils down to what is the business value of that idea.
If it doesn't improve business in some specific way, it doesn't matter how cool it is, it will just produce costs (developer time * hourly rate) without any benefit to the bottom line.
It doesn't happen if the company is willing to pay what they deserve, instead of wanting to have them to work for the same low rates as the ones they are paying to some offshoring consulting partner the other side of the world.
Or if they provide a work environment that makes one feel like coming to the office.
Good developers care about many factors besides shiny toys.
Good developers will also prefer to be well paid and have a good environment while working with modern toys instead of MUMPS infested codebase.
(This is not an argument in favor of running after every new technology immediately, but you'll have trouble hiring and keeping good development on a JavaEE 2 environment with SVN build system based on 1990 code practices.)
To most developers, interesting problems and technologies are part of the compensation. To attract talent to work for unattractive technology you'll need very attractive salary and benefits. If a developer can't expect to gain transferrable skills from a job, that must be factored in. Jobs where you gain experience nobody else needs are the start of many year-end careers.
OTOH, sexy startups often get away with paying less but, in return, offer environments a DAX-level customer simply can't.
I was too flippant. It isn't about "shiny toys", it is about being respected enough within an organization to be trusted to self-determine technical direction. It is difficult to hire good developers if you have a reputation for thinking you know best when it comes to very technical decisions like when it does and doesn't make sense to upgrade individual software components. It is definitely a balance, but the grandparent comment struck me as sounding like it was on the too-paternalistic side.
So that developer just took $cost_of_moduleA_rewrite euros/dollar/yan/whatever out of project budget because the module was "ugly".
So what value does the money spent reflect on the productivity gains of the users, costs related to build software, maintenance costs and so on.
If in the long run it has helped to reduce costs that without the re-write it would be higher than $cost_of_moduleA_rewrite, then it has business value.
If the developer has spent $cost_of_moduleA_rewrite without any positive outcome on project costs, then it doesn't have any business value.
As technical lead on some projects whenever someone comes will cool idea X, my question usually boils down to what is the business value of that idea.
If it doesn't improve business in some specific way, it doesn't matter how cool it is, it will just produce costs (developer time * hourly rate) without any benefit to the bottom line.