Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Should be said. Older people often don't have as much experience with some of the newer technologies. For example I am 36 and even though I feel that I am up on Node.js and CoffeeScript and ToffeeScript and some NoSQL and Three.is and some other stuff that I think is still relatively new, I have little to no mobile dev experience. Part of that might be related to the fact that mobile dev was sort of niche for a significant part of my programming career. I have a lot of experience with many different technologies but not the same ones as younger developers so I don't quite share their programming worldview.

I have also spoken to a number of developers older than me who are far behind. Like they didn't understand the point of Ruby or Node and thought Php was just fine. Or they thought that all of the organizations code should go in two giant repos like the old svn way.

So the reality is that sometimes older people aren't up to date or don't share your culture.

Having said all of that I personally believe that in most respects younger developers are just as far behind as the older developers and often lacking quite a bit if perspective. Whereas older developers need to update their perspective.

Obviously it depends on the person so generalizations like those are usually going to be counterproductive because the best developers are in their own category

Should be said, black people are lazy, and Asians are good at math!

I want you to repeat that statement any time you feel like you have a valid stereotype that must be said. Because it should help to remind you that a stereotype is not a truth.

Don't help promote ageism. Some people make development a job, others make it a lifestyle. Age has nothing to do with that. I have devs anywhere from 25-30, and I'm often disappointed by their lack of exposure or passion for the new tech out there. But they will all go home at the end of the day and read comics, or watch TV. I'm 39, and I come home and play with a new technology or build a new product. Your age doesn't define you, your passion does.

Thanks for pointing this out. You said it better than I could: "Some people make development a job, others make it a lifestyle. Age has nothing to do with that. I have devs anywhere from 25-30, and I'm often disappointed by their lack of exposure or passion for the new tech out there. But they will all go home at the end of the day and read comics, or watch TV. "

Well said. A colleague of mine who had no GF, no family, no responsibilities at 27 continued to disappoint me on a regular basis with his lack of drive to learn. He had zero growth since joining our team, and has just signed on with a startup who made the mistake of not doing a technical interview. Whoever the team lead is who gets stuck with him is screwed. On a side note, I learned how important rigorous technical interviews are. When he told me he got the job and said it involved business intelligence/data warehousing, I mentioned to him that he had never worked with these things, and asked him if he indicated this in the interview. His response: "Well, I know SQL, and I looked at star schemas on wikipedia and it doesn't look that complicated." I then asked him (this was him giving me a 2 weeks notice) if he had contacted the team lead to find out what the tech stack was so he could start reading up on using any tools he wasn't familiar with. This hadn't even occurred to him.

Lack of passion spans the age groups.

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