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Comment by willtim | Hacker News Reader

I would rather hire someone with that mindset. They are more likely to be interested in solving the actual business problems. The junior guy excited about frameworks and fads, is much more likely to create complexity (usually from vast numbers of dependencies and inappropriate technology choices). The flip side of course is that if you already have a mess, then the junior guy might be a better choice to maintain it.

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I wouldn’t be excited at all hiring someone whose skillset is ten years out of date. It tells me a lot about their lack of willingness to keep up with technology.

This depends on what you mean by "technology". I would expect them to be aware of emerging trends in the industry. Bonus points also for an interest in the latest computer science. But I don't care if they haven't hacked on groovy gradle scripts or injected Spring AOP pointcuts into Java beans. This sort of tech is accidental ad-hoc complexity and not progress.

It’s not about “emerging trends” but they should be familiar with a chosen technology stack that is in the “plateau of productivity” in the hype cycle.

Spring's AOP pointcuts (in its first incarnation as AspectJ) and Groovy (pre-Gradle and pre-Apache) are both over 15 yrs old. To not know those is having a skillset that's well over ten years out of date.

Heck, I know what those are and I've only written 20 lines of production Java code. They came up repeatedly when I was researching using Microsoft's (now defunct) Unity framework to do AOP in C#.

https://github.com/BitsCorner/AOP-UnityInterceptor

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