From what I've seen, it is always the other way around. It's the hacker who learned the culture on IRC who is the most likely to get swept away by fads. Circa 2

From what I've seen, it is always the other way around. It's the hacker who learned the culture on IRC who is the most likely to get swept away by fads. Circa 2004, they think everything should be Ruby On Rails. Circa 2008, they tell you that SQL databases are obsolete and everyone should use NoSQL databases. Circa 2012 they tell you that Ruby on Rails is obsolete and everyone should use NodeJS. They consider themselves "plugged in" and up-to-date, and they are the most vulnerable to the fads. Meanwhile, I knew a woman who first became a nurse and only second took up computer programming, to write software to track maternity progress, and she has no interest in the hype cycle, instead she just writes good, simple code that gets the job done. And I know a guy who started as a statistician, and who later became a programmer so he could do serious data analysis. He doesn't get distracted by the flavor of the week. He sticks with good Python tools and he writes the code he needs to get the job done.