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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev.

But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon.

On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices. And there are lots of decades-old frameworks which aren’t obsolete: lots of people greenfield projects with C++ and Spring Boot and .NET, and unless I’m mistaken the C ABI and system calls haven’t changed much over the past ~40 years. So it's not like being old automatically means or even really suggests you're going to use worse, outdated techniques.

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> But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge

I'm not so sure. Google and StackOverflow are chock full of outdated (sometimes dangerous!) advice and knowledge on just about any tech subject, which hurts the young as much as the old.

I've seen just as many outdated suggestions from junior devs repeating the first thing they found on google as I have older devs with stale knowledge. I'd probably argue the former has been a larger problem, honestly.

Bootcamps such as Hack Reactor (purchased by Galvanize) have curriculum which is basically outdated by 10 years, so you're going to have graduates using var, anonymous self-executing functions as modules that mutate the global scope, and libraries like jQuery and bluebird.

If any student leaves that program with a modern perspective of web dev (such as using Redux or even RTK), it will be due to their own personal grit.

C'est la vie.

Can't speak for Hack Reactor, but your generalization of "bootcamps like" is wrong. Went to a bootcamp in 2016 and was doing React/Redux on the front end.

> Bootcamps such as Hack Reactor (purchased by Galvanize)

No, this generalization is quite correct. If you went to a bootcamp which was not such as Hack Reactor, then perhaps you may wish to promote the program by name and discuss your experience there.

I went to Fullstack Academy in 2017 and React and Redux were both part of the core curriculum

This is totally wrong. I hired a couple devs from Hack Reactor years ago and they had tons of lessons based on React and the ecosystem around it.

Your information might not reflect the online-only program, which is now the only choice. My information is from two sequential cohorts of students who are yet to graduate. Also, if you know what to Google for, then you can see how the curriculum has updated over time. Some students do this to cheat, and they can do so precisely because the curriculum is largely frozen in time.

Hack Reactor has made Redux completely optional and so almost nobody choose it for their projects. This may have been in response to transitioning to an online-only program. If students understand anything on the "React ecosystem" including even Redux, it is due to their own personal ambition. If you see Redux explicitly listed in their curriculum, do not be confused.

If you see students with Next.js, RTK, or any other framework or library from the React ecosystem on their portfolio, that is due to their own grit.

I'm nearing 40 and I've seen a bit of both. By far the best teams I've worked in had a healthy mixture of experienced developers and younger ones, although I'd say the main catalyst was a mentoring mentality where everyone, young and old, was encouraged to share their experiences (especially the bad ones) in an attempt to brainstorm/crowdsource an improvement to the status quo.

I've also seen the opposite of what you'd expect: a young startup with a very young team that functioned on outdated practices and tools. My first contact with their codebase was a shock to the system – a mishmash of competing coding styles and conventions, barely any of them a best practice, much of it not very idiomatic, an alarming lack of consistency. The choice of tools, libraries and frameworks was (by startup standards) definitely not best in class, and where good choices had been made, the joy was short lived by realisation that they were on old versions, or not using their tooling properly.

But, anecdotes aside, there's a point that generally gets overlooked. Best practices and good developer experience are the result of intentional choices, often in retrospect. The only way to come up with best practices or to improve DX is through experience -- especially poor experiences. I mean, who would've thought that experience was an asset.

I'm an old software dev.

To be sure, when I began a good dev was good at memory management (ha, ha).

More recently, a good dev is one that is good at concurrency.

New devs might not understand memory management, should they though? Has everyone come across (at least once) where a junior dev creating an "integer object"? Or perhaps an object to represent a character?

When I began I rarely even saw a single secondary thread in code, very rarely saw the need to create one. Then again, one core machines so.

> but you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge.

Not in the frontend dev space. I once left it for 2 years. when i came back it was a whole new world

anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices.

As an old guy I would find it very hard to keep up to date with the "latest best practices" because I tend to think of "latest" and "best practices" as antithetical. JQuery is a good example: I never invested time in it since I figured it would pass. I could smell it from the way kids were raving about it. So this type of article foreshadowing its demise is nice to see. Like when you drag your feet on some looming deadline at work and some force majeure makes it completely irrelevant.

I sat out of jQuery as well but more because I dislike (distrust?) layers, prefer to be closer to the stack as it were.

Either that's wisdom from an older dev that has been burned in the past or that's just an old dev set in his ways. Take your pick. ;-)

IMHO there was definitely a period when jQuery solved a whole host of problems for you and allowed you to write client side code much faster. If you weren't using jQuery or an equivalent you were kneecapping yourself unnecessarily.

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