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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

People who hire developers wouldn't be as focused on the candidates' experience with the technology in the job ad if developers were typically more open for new tech that would be learnt at the job. Try to teach a 40+ Perl developer a new language if you want to see what I mean...

When you compare IT with other industries like the author did, this is what makes hiring so different. Other industries are fine with hiring graduates with no specific experience and the candidates are eager to learn on the job. Whereas in IT, half the people will tell you "can't do this", "don't like that", "won't learn Java" ...

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I’m almost 40. I can learn new programming languages just fine, thank you. And new languages/tech generally aren’t too hard to pick up once you’ve learned a few, for the most part.

They do a lot of the same things, just the incantations are different.

I do have more non-coding hobbies now and other responsibilities sucking up more time than when I was young, so I don’t have as much time to learn them on my own, but I still can and do learn them, especially if needed at work.

Thanks for that. Necessity is is me chopping wood for 8 hours. Everything else is enjoying the fire.

I've worked with guys in their 50s and 60s who learned new languages and picked them up and wielded them with far more skill than some 20-something kid.

So what? Nobody claimed that they can't. If you can't learn a programming language, you're not a programmer. I'm 47 myself and learned Go in a week or so (7 years ago). What I wrote is that they won't, in my experience as CEO/CTO I've had enough people who used "the one true language" for 20+ years and outright refused to touch anything else. This emotional attachment to languages (or, more recently, frameworks) and the fact that you get away with it too often (there's always another job for your favourite language) is what makes hiring difficult and different. Imagine a car mechanic who refuses to repair a BMW...

Sorry, your statement came across a little differently than it seems you intended. But I also disagree with your idea here - I've found stubbornness in young people and openness in older people as often as the reverse. If someone is interviewing for a job in your stack though, you should assume they aren't going to come in and say "guess what, I'm only writing C".

Ageism isn't cool, dude.

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