The Church of Tool-Worship: When Clients Don’t Want Engineers — They Want Priests

 Some companies don’t really want developers. They want shamans.

They want someone who has already touched their sacred tool, read its scriptures, memorized its undocumented quirks, and completed the onboarding rituals under a full moon while standing on one leg. They call this “specific experience.” The rest of us call it what it is: fear.

A certain type of client has become so paralyzed by their own tech stack that they fixate not on engineering competence, but on exact-tool familiarity. And nothing exposes this pathology more clearly than the fetishization of SaaS platforms — especially when the platform self‑proclaims as “the leader” of anything.

Real leaders don’t need to declare leadership. They let the market do the talking. When a tool has to shout its supremacy from the rooftops, that’s a red flag disguised as a slogan.

But the deeper issue isn’t the marketing fluff. It’s the clients who buy into it.

The Cargo Cult of "Exact Tool Experience"

We see this constantly: a client insists on hiring only developers who have already worked with their exact billing system, their exact cloud service, their exact flavor of API gateway. Substitute Chargebee, Stripe, Auth0, HubSpot, Shopify, whatever — the story is always the same.

It doesn’t matter if the engineer spent twenty years integrating systems far more complex than the tool in question. It doesn’t matter if they’ve architected pipelines that moved millions of records a day, tamed legacy platforms held together with duct tape, or built real infrastructure with real stakes.

To this type of client, none of it counts — because it wasn’t their tool.

This isn’t risk management. It’s superstition.

The Paradox at Play

The irony is delicious:

The more straightforward the tool, the louder the client demands prior experience.

Why? Because simple SaaS platforms lull non-technical stakeholders into thinking they’re complex. Dashboards, toggles, gradient buttons — all of it performs sophistication while hiding the fact that, under the hood, it’s a REST API with billing logic.

So the client convinces themselves:

“If we hire someone who hasn’t already used this platform, they might break something.”

This ignores the obvious: if your developer needs prior experience with a plug‑and‑play subscription tool, your system architecture isn’t the problem. Your hiring philosophy is.

Experience Is Built, Not Purchased

Any senior engineer who has dealt with real, production-grade systems knows how to learn a new integration:

• Read the API docs

• Map the data models

• Test the webhooks

• Build the sync layer

• Handle edge cases

• Write the logging

• Deploy the damn thing

The platform doesn’t matter. The discipline does.

And discipline is earned. It doesn’t come from clicking around in a SaaS UI.

Why These Clients Deserve the Consequences

Tool-worship clients inevitably hit the same wall:

• They can’t hire fast enough.

• When they do hire, the skills don’t generalize.

• Their team becomes dependent on trivia rather than engineering.

• Their system ossifies around the limitations of the tool.

Instead of choosing adaptable developers, they choose “subject-matter button-pushers.” Then they wonder why no one can refactor anything without breaking half the flow.

A Better Way

Competent teams hire competent engineers and trust them to learn tools along the way. Because that’s the job. Tools change. Principles don’t.

The healthiest teams I’ve ever seen do this:

1. Hire for fundamentals — not tool trivia.

2. Expect senior engineers to pick up any platform within days.

3. Document the integration instead of relying on tribal memory.

4. Stop believing the marketing slogans.

Final Thought

If a company looks at an engineer with decades of integration experience and says, “Sorry, you haven’t used our SaaS billing tool yet,” they’re not protecting themselves from risk.

They are the risk.

And sooner or later, they pay for it.

Feel free to share or repost — there are far too many teams out there worshiping tools instead of hiring engineers who actually know how to build things.