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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a greybeard yet, but they're my favorite type of colleague to work with, they KNOW THINGS, they have experience, they have war-stories, they're generally not impressed by every new bloatware that comes along.

All things equal, I'd hire the greybeard, actual beard a plus.

In the future, I can only imagine ageism being a thing too, but flipped around, when it's realized that older and more experienced people are needed.

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> they're generally not impressed by every new bloatware that comes along.

The problem is when this attitude backfires into immobilism. Sometimes there are solid reasons why the new hot shit is hot, and just saying "we can do the same already with X" can be reductive (and leading to technical debt down the line).

But yeah, now I'm 43, I see the difference in attitude that I bring when faced with wide-eyed youngsters, even just because they often "drink the kool-aid" a bit too uncritically.

That's true, there's a difference between being conservative and immobile. I've actually not experienced any of that behavior, the people I've worked with have been interested in new stuff, they've just been good at identifying what's relevant and not.

I can teach you the secret to this. Anytime you feel yourself saying "Wow, Y is so much better than X because of A, B, and C" then X is what will make it big.

they're my favorite type of colleague to work with, they KNOW THINGS, they have experience, they have war-stories

They can be. And when they're great they're GREAT! However I've also worked with people who can tell fantastic stories about punch cards and LISP machines, but also haven't picked up any new skills since the late 90s and have no idea what has happened in the industry in the past 10 years.

>> And when they're great they're GREAT! However I've also worked with people who can tell fantastic stories about punch cards and LISP machines, but also haven't picked up any new skills since the late 90s and have no idea what has happened in the industry in the past 10 years.

I guess I'm a greybeard now even if it's only got a little grey, and I can tell you I've been annoyed at stories of punch cards for 20 years now. They were cute stories in the 1990s, but now I cringe if someone tries to relate "the punch card story". And I mean "the" punch card story because I think they're all lying. Every one of them dropped a box of punch cards they spent a lot of time getting right and had to sort that mess out. I think it's just a meme and old people tell it like it actually happened to them because it used to be a good story. Sorry, it's not. It's more tired than me ;-)

When I was your age, we used to have these older guys telling us about the punch-card days... Shit.

The youngest punch card person should be at least sixty by now to be working in ~1980 when that stuff was on its last legs. Should be very few of them left as the industry was an order or two smaller at the time.

Sure, and to be honest it's probably a decade ago since I last heard a punch card story from a colleague.

Now I guess "the punch card story" has been replaced by people like me saying things like "I remember when hard drives where measured in megabytes" and "You know when I first installed Linux on my computer at home I needed a stack of 30 floppy disks (and you won't believe what happened when it turned out disk 22 was corrupted)" :)

And soon it will be replaced by "when I was young we had to do web development using nothing but JavaScript and JQuery, we didn't even have an import statement"

Followed a few years later "back in my day we had these things called 'docker containers', and let me tell you deploying them on AWS was no walk in the park..."

We have soooooo many war stories. I always like to think they are entertaining for my colleagues so it's good to hear that I'm not totally off-base.

Can you send one our way?

I once presided over a DB2 to Oracle migration for reasons that had nothing to do with technological considerations and everything to do with politics. The hardest thing to get right was the different interpretations of what was 'null' in a given column. It was a never ending stream of in DB2 it's null but in oracle it's not. Or vice versa. You wouldn't think you'd have so much of that to sort though but I would bet at least 40-50% of the issues we ran into were purely around what one database counted as null and another did not. The empty string in one database would null in another as an example.

I have so many war stories, I stop myself from telling them because I feel like it's just a game of one-upmanship.

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