I can provide some insight into this, as someone in their 30s, I fully understand and appreciate your point, but I nevertheless ask specific questions about tec

I can provide some insight into this, as someone in their 30s, I fully understand and appreciate your point, but I nevertheless ask specific questions about technologies we use. The reason that specific questions are asked, in my interview context anyway, is to ensure there is ideological alignment and acceptance of the technology. Whilst an experienced developer should be able to understand a programming language/framework, being willing to work with its idioms or recommended best practices can be difficult for some. As an extreme example, if someone is well versed in procedural programming, and we work in an OO heavy environment, then my concern is about whether the candidate can understand the reasoning for our abstractions and contribute to our OO modelling conversations. The same could be said of an experienced OO practitioner being asked to code in a functional manner. I think a good rebuttal, although I haven't had candidates do this nor I have tried this in interviews myself, is to to be well read about what a technological detail is about then draw parallels to what you do know in detail and explain how you are able to work with the technology the interviewer is talking about due to the similarities with your experience. For example, working in a PHP shop, if I asked someone about Doctrine ORM and they responded that they have worked with Hibernate in Java and that allowed me to go into a line of questioning that discussed modelling and leads away from the specifics of Doctrine, I would be perfectly happy with such a response. On the other hand, if they outright dismiss it and say that they prefer to always right queries directly, I may need to question context and decide whether they are so inflexible about it that it would cause them issues when working with our codebase.