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0 pointsmarcus_holmes6y ago0 comments

I'm over 50, and this is the killer. Not only for others, but also to avoid personally.

It's very, very easy to get into a "grumpy old fart" mindset, where anything new or changing is dismissed out of hand. I've had to fight hard to stop this from happening, and it's still my first response to anything new.

Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool.

If I'm interviewing a 50+ for a job, I want to see evidence that they haven't fallen into Grumpy Old Fart syndrome.

The converse is also true - if I'm interviewing someone younger, I want to see evidence that they're not caught up in tech fads. Too many times I've seen good tech thrown away because it's not in the hip-and-happening language/framework/platform/etc. And there's a lot to learn from the mistakes of the past ;) And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast [0].

But to be honest, I'd be worried if I had to interview for a role. It'd be a sign that my network wasn't where I'd like it to be. Keeping that up to date is as valuable as keeping the tech skills sharp.

[0] example at random cough

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7 comments · 3 top-level

SaltyBackendGuy6y ago· 3 in thread

> And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast.

Just an observation. This statement might fail the "Grumpy Old Fart syndrome" test.

The kid's _probably_ not an idiot and it might be a good time to educate the lad with real life experience and references to data to support your experience.

marcus_holmesOP6y ago

To be honest, I can live with people being keen on Mongo. I kinda get the enthusiasm for it - schemas are a pain in the neck.

It's the "SQL is obsolete" part, coming from someone who never bothered to learn it, that gets me every time.

poplarstand6y ago

Offering my two cents as an idiot kid working with a posse of late career SQL DBA's:

SQL isn't obsolete, but it's awfully tiring to deal with folks who treat it as the end-all be-all of data tech. The project I'm working on right now has a few dozen stored procedures stapled on to a Hadoop cluster because none of the industry veterans trust this new-fangled "Spark" technology. When the quarterly schema changes come around, the entire environment has to be redone so as to accommodate the hard-coded SSIS ingestion pipeline.

baq6y ago

mongo is good if you don't use it for much and i'll refer to any of aphyr's analyses. i imagine whippersnappers don't read these. i personally won't touch a database which hasn't been in aphyr's private db hell. only a few gray hair, too.

dustingetz6y ago· 1 in thread

> kid ... tech fads

The two times I was called a fad-chaser (literally) was adopting Scala in 2012 and React.js in 2013. AFAICT, that's the label boomers use to dismiss the people who are making progress. Getting the company to use Reactjs in particular drove a huge increase in quality, velocity, and recruiting.

collyw6y ago

I have been fixing bugs in our React front end. Its a bloated mess. It may make writing code faster, but tracking down bugs afterwards seems to be far more complex.

ghaff6y ago

>Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool.

Yes, there's a fine line between applying experience to understand and explain why something has been tried 10 times before in the industry and the 11th time is not going to be a charm--and, as you say, routinely dismissing anything that even peripherally echoes something that didn't work last time even though a lot of things are different now.

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