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Discussion on: Why Older People Struggle In Programming Jobs

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kwstannard profile image
Kelly Stannard

I got to meet a guy who had just retired from development and he was so glad to be done with churn. Hopefully I can ride out my career with only a handful of language/framework changes as I would prefer to master software design than be chasing the latest and greatest for the next 20-30 years.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

I believe that a healthy approach to churn is to always be observing and, on some superficial level, experimenting with new tech. Whenever you can spare the time, it's extremely healthy to peruse the "latest and greatest" languages / libraries / packages / techniques / etc. While perusing those technologies, you'll expand your own understanding and you'll often be able to appropriate some of the features of that tech into your old-fashioned, aging solutions.

But there should be a massive gulf between choosing to evaluate tech versus adopting it. It's like window shopping. Go ahead. Gaze on all the fancy new goods for sale this season. But if you feel compelled to buy all those goods as fast as you can, you'll go broke.

If someone wants to show me a new JS library that would, theoretically, replace React, then I'm all for it! Demonstrate it for me. Lemme play around with it. "Sell" me on it! I'm always interested to hear about new approaches.

But if you seriously expect me to adopt your new tech (which, on some level, means abandoning the legacy tech), well... It's certainly possible. But it's extremely unlikely. You'll have to do a whole lot more than just demonstrate a few features. And if you're trying to sell the new tech based on the generic idea that it's cool and the old tech is just dumb, then you can save your breath.