10 ms·

> He was interviewed by a younger engineer who told him, “I’m always surprised when older programmers keep up on technology.” As someone relatively old, I've b

by 781 8y ago

> He was interviewed by a younger engineer who told him, “I’m always surprised when older programmers keep up on technology.” As someone relatively old, I've been in a lot of developer interviews. I also noticed that older programmers tend to not be as up to date in newer technologies or ways of doing things. I don't think it's strictly limited to technology. How many 50-year old do you know who listen to trap music? Or approve of the way teens dress these days? It's just the classic "older people tend to be more conservative" fact. At some point most people get stuck in the things the were doing/liking when they were younger. The hate new music, they dismiss newer technologies (to open a rats nest: Electron anyone?) I'm sure I'll get comments like "I'm 18 and I hate trap music and Electron". That's not the point, I'm talking about distributions not individual cases.

Moru 8y ago
I think it's more that older coders to a larger degree have more commitments, there's less time to keep up with all new things while doing your job, family and whatever clubs your kids are member of.
- scarface74 8y ago
  One of my responsibilities to my family (I’m in my mid 40s) is to make sure that we are all fed and have a roof over our head. If that means taking time to keep up with the $cool_kids and stay employable so be it. If you look at my resume over the past 10 years and the tech I’ve used, it’s indistinguishable from younger developers.
  - war1025 8y ago
    To a certain extent you also just need to be aware of where you are and where the market is going. You don't need to keep up with every single new technology, you just need an idea of where you fit in the current market and what skills you will need to pick up if / when you go to switch jobs.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You need to pick up the skills before you switch jobs because othet people will already know it and be able to hit the ground running. I’m already asking for above median salaries (not talking about FAANG salaries), I need to show a level of architectural efficiency. Meaning no, I am not going to study leetCode and I’ll probably laugh if you ask me to invert a binary tree, but I will draw out and discuss a well design architecture and software development process and answer questions that show I have proficiency at the technologies I claim to know.
potta_coffee 8y ago
You're making a lot of anecdotal generalizations here that contribute to the problem rather than help address it. What kind of music somebody likes or the clothing they're comfortable with shouldn't be part of the conversation at all, and for every anecdotal old-guy that hates Electron, I've met an anecdotal old-guy who's sharp as a tack and pushing the envelope with the latest tech.
- 781 8y ago
  But the phenomenon I'm talking about is well established in psychology: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mr-personality/201410/why-are-older-people-more-conservative https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mr-personality/20141...
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    The older I get, the more 'liberal' I get. I think it comes from having more and more empathy. The more I live, the less I feel I can judge people and their choices. Even if it is to prefer Mongo over Postgres :-)
    - yxhuvud 8y ago
      Mongo support acid transactions nowadays, so the reason for vitriol has lessened a lot. I like my explicit db schema though.
- resource0x 8y ago
  The chances that YOU, when you reach same age, will be interested in pushing the envelope with the latest tech, are very low. The chances that you will find "latest tech" absurd and would rather be starving than pushing said envelope, are very high. When I was young, I couldn't even imagine the future with Spring framework, Hibernate, Angular, AWS configuration etc. The profession is dead for me, and has been dead for quite some time. This is my own anecdotal evidence, sorry.
  - potta_coffee 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gerbilly 8y ago
> I also noticed that older programmers tend to not be as up to date in newer technologies or ways of doing things. I've been doing this a long time and it doesn't matter to me. The newer stuff is most of the time just a variation on a theme that I've seen turnover three or four times since i've been doing this. What older coders have that younger ones do not, is experience. This can often halve the workload on some projects. The older I get in this profession, the more results I get out of less and less code. Also, let's not immediately fetishize the newer stuff. It is often a less well implemented retread of older technology. Seems like people have less patience for learning existing systems, so they just re-write some quick and dirty replacement and call it good. Perhaps it might be better if younger programmers learned the old stuff instead of just badly reinventing the wheel every few years.
- howard941 8y ago
  This. And older engineers have finer bullshit detectors. ISTM ageism is real, and it's all about the money.
- unclebucknasty 8y ago
  >Perhaps it might be better if younger programmers learned the old stuff instead of just badly reinventing the wheel every few years. That's pure gold. Not to say there haven't been advances--there certainly have been. But, there's also the issue of the shininess of new tech giving it undue cred, while simultaneously translating to an outsized denigration of the tech it purports to replace. Frankly, a lot of these problems have been solved, and solved well. Look at NoSQL as an example. There are certainly use cases for it, but then people went nuts, exclaiming things like "RDBMS must die" and touting no ACID transactions as a feature/benefit. Then, you get the trickle of reports that maybe NoSQL wasn't the best choice for this or that. Finally, fast-forward to 2018 and you have announcements from MongoDB that they now support ACID transactions. Many older coders have seen enough of these cycles, and have adopted a justifiably-cynical posture of "wait for it...".
  - 420codebro 8y ago
    No ACID as a feature - lol. "My car? Fuck the airbags, fuck the seatbelts! It is fast though!"
ergothus 8y ago
I certainly don't want to chime in with a detraction that misses your point, but I do feel there's a slight difference. (for context, I'm 42) I think the reason older coders don't "keep up" is because you have to lose ground first. If I want to adopt a new technology, I have to first learn how to handle problems I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO SOLVE with my current technologies. The better I am with solving the problems I encounter already, the more I will have to backpedal before I can go forward in a new tech. And while I definitely get better overall from learning a broader base of techs, over time there are definitely diminishing returns. The cost-benefit of learning something new vs spending that time either learning more of what I'm already in, or just solving any of the infinite things I want to get done is a balance that will slide more and more towards not bothering to learn new tech unless there's a real need. Add in that this is an industry rife with Imposter Syndrome that DEFINITELY bites you in the face during any moment of struggling to "get" a new tech, and there are plenty of incentives against embracing new tech beyond just "I don't like change". (though that is definitely present - I'm a JS dev currently, so I'm well familiar with the dismissive and arrogant attitudes that can be tossed around).
- xtracerx 8y ago
  I hear this from older developers a lot, that the problems we are solving today have been solved already. That may be true to some extent, but I think that is dangerous, the ways the problems are solved again have different characteristics and advantages and generally push the ball forward. I think of it like forest fires clearing out old grown for new, and I think it's best to just have a zen-like mindset of being a constant beginner.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    I completely agree. I'm not giving a rant about society re-inventing the wheel, I'm talking at a personal level. If I know language X, but I'm trying to learn language Y, I have to learn how to do things that I already know how to do in X. It's a change that HAS to happen to learn, and I'll walk away a better coder, but that doesn't make the process of relearning any more enjoyable or more productive. I switched jobs recently and tried to adopt a zen-like attitude of beginners mind. It definitely helped...but I'd be lying if I said I never hit frustration points where I'm trying to go from A to C but I have to learn all about B when I don't WANT to care about B, I want to get to C. A good attitude helps, but I think the underlying reason is still true and is part of why experienced devs aren't adopting new tech at the rate of newer devs.
GordonS 8y ago
I don't know; anecdotally, these days it seems things are not quite like that anymore. I'm pushing 40, and like reggae, acid jazz, electronic. I keep up to date (as far as one can) with tech, programming, cloud and the like. It's not just me - it feels like a lot of older people around me don't match the old stereotypes. Older colleagues are learning Typescript, my grandmother reads erotica... Youth culture is of course always changing, but older people are perhaps more liberal than they used to be, and don't feel like they need to behave a certain way any more more.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > ...my grandmother reads erotica... I'm proud of your grandmother, but TMI, man. TMI.
- potta_coffee 8y ago
  It's not just you. The youngsters in tech are blatantly ageist. They'll be singing a different tune when they're 40 and the generation behind is already chiseling out their headstones.
dv_dt 8y ago
There is a problem of equating being "up to date" with "competent for the position". Up to date might mean you know how to work in the syntax & convention of the stack of interest, but that's largely independent of the level of competence for overall software development & discipline. If an older programmer is solid on the latter, getting up to date really isn't a large amount of time. It's harder to assess, just like its hard to assess in interviews even if the engineer is "up to date" - look at the perennial debate on how best to interview candidates.
jiggliemon 8y ago
If you think newer “technology” (re: programming language or framework) is superior to older “technology” – you are likely agist, and part of the problem.
- 781 8y ago
  So you think that someone saying that Python or C++ is superior to COBOL is ageist.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    Depending on the context yes. If your bank has some COBOL systems running to keep accounts up to date, do you really want some team of pinheads to 'fix it' by porting it to python?
magduf 8y ago
>The hate new music That's a different issue. New music really is garbage; the entire industry has changed over the last several decades. There's a reason so many younger people are listening to classic rock.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  Everyone has different tastes, but there is some nice new music out there. This for example: http://www.hawaiianreggae.org/artists http://www.hawaiianreggae.org/artists Nice and mellow, lots of young new artists. It's a pretty good scene.
  - magduf 8y ago
    These days, to find new music that's actually any good, you have to look really hard, and everything that isn't mainstream has really veered off into very different directions (meaning any given artist/subgenre probably won't appeal to you). It isn't like the "old days" when the mainstream music was actually good. There's a reason all those rockers from the 70s and 80s (and some 60s!) are still touring.
    - 781 8y ago
      Your comment hilariously proves the point. Ask the kids what they think about today's mainstream music. They will say it's amazing. Who do you think drives the charts? Yes, yes, I know, you are or you know a couple youngsters who think anything newer than Pink Floyd is shit. And you think that the charts are not organic, they are "marketing", where the record label pay to get entry and rank.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- renaudg 8y ago
  Sorry, but this is spoken like a true curmudgeon. Can I ask where it is you live to see hordes of young people finding solace in classic rock (or any sort of purely guitar-based music) ? Except maybe in US rural communities where it's all about country music (always has been, always will be) those days are well and truly over. "Nobody wants an electric guitar anymore" : https://qz.com/1013293/rock-and-roll-is-dead-sales-of-fender-and-gibson-electric-guitars-prove-it/ https://qz.com/1013293/rock-and-roll-is-dead-sales-of-fender... Meanwhile electronic music has taken millenials by storm. Tomorrowland festival sold out nearly 400.000 tickets in 40 minutes a few weeks ago. Same kind of numbers every year for Electric Daisy Carnival in the US. Never in history has there been so much quality music released every day in all genres, because musicians can now do so without the gatekeepers of the past, much like Youtube has shattered the TV networks. The consequence of that is that it's all about fragmented niches and discovery can be challenging. But there is gem after gem in my Spotify "Weekly Discovery" playlist. There has never been a more exciting time to be a music lover !
unclebucknasty 8y ago
>I also noticed that older programmers tend to not be as up to date in newer technologies or ways of doing things. Serious consideration: I wonder how the cost of "older programmers not being as up to date" compares to the cost of younger programmers too quickly adopting newer technologies.
DanBC 8y ago
> That's not the point, I'm talking about distributions not individual cases. But you're not talking about distributions. You talk about the individuals you meet in interviews.
waynecochran 8y ago
As an older software engineer (52) I have developed a good sense of what "new technology" has a fleeting "here today and gone tomorrow" lifespan. I have seen a lot come and go. This is especially true now with "web tech" which I quit paying a lot of attention to because it so ephemeral. It is my math background and numerical computing (e.g., optimization) skills that keep me ahead of the pack. Only the best of the younger generation will keep up with me. Learn things that will be important for forever. Life is a breath and then we are gone.
- PorterDuff 8y ago
  From the get off my lawn crowd (60) I don't mind being pushed out mostly because the work doesn't look that interesting at this point. I managed for 38 years with nothing in the way of languages (C, C++ when it became available, a whole bunch of assembly languages for exotic processors) by modern standards. Most of the heavy lifting in the workstation and high end embedded world was algorithmic. All they are is dust in the wind.
  - souprock 8y ago
    That is great experience, particularly "a whole bunch of assembly languages for exotic processors". Here, a job listing for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 Within 10 years here I had encountered more than 10 different CPU architectures. I've lost count now, but it is probably at least a dozen. The same goes for OSes.
robseed 8y ago
45, certain "trap music" is a typo
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_music https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_music But...it was popular in the late 90s, which corresponds to us mid-40 age people anyways.
xorcist 8y ago
> It's just the classic "older people tend to be more conservative" fact. Can we please kill this myth already? That was extraordinary so during the era when social changes swept through society, but someone who spent their formative years during the 70s will hardly regard today's society anything else than an extension of the changes which took place then. There are many different ways to act conservatively. Resistance to new ideas because "but we've always done it this way" is a lot more common with people whose definition of "always" stretches to five (maybe ten) years. > Electron anyone? Well, let's put it this way: Most ideas are bad. But you can't dismiss all ideas on that statistical ground, because then you would miss the really good ones.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by 781 8y ago

Moru 8y ago

I think it's more that older coders to a larger degree have more commitments, there's less time to keep up with all new things while doing your job, family and whatever clubs your kids are member of.

scarface74 8y ago
One of my responsibilities to my family (I’m in my mid 40s) is to make sure that we are all fed and have a roof over our head. If that means taking time to keep up with the $cool_kids and stay employable so be it. If you look at my resume over the past 10 years and the tech I’ve used, it’s indistinguishable from younger developers.
- war1025 8y ago
  To a certain extent you also just need to be aware of where you are and where the market is going. You don't need to keep up with every single new technology, you just need an idea of where you fit in the current market and what skills you will need to pick up if / when you go to switch jobs.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    You need to pick up the skills before you switch jobs because othet people will already know it and be able to hit the ground running. I’m already asking for above median salaries (not talking about FAANG salaries), I need to show a level of architectural efficiency. Meaning no, I am not going to study leetCode and I’ll probably laugh if you ask me to invert a binary tree, but I will draw out and discuss a well design architecture and software development process and answer questions that show I have proficiency at the technologies I claim to know.

potta_coffee 8y ago

You're making a lot of anecdotal generalizations here that contribute to the problem rather than help address it. What kind of music somebody likes or the clothing they're comfortable with shouldn't be part of the conversation at all, and for every anecdotal old-guy that hates Electron, I've met an anecdotal old-guy who's sharp as a tack and pushing the envelope with the latest tech.

781 8y ago
But the phenomenon I'm talking about is well established in psychology: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mr-personality/201410/why-are-older-people-more-conservative https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/mr-personality/20141...
- gerbilly 8y ago
  The older I get, the more 'liberal' I get. I think it comes from having more and more empathy. The more I live, the less I feel I can judge people and their choices. Even if it is to prefer Mongo over Postgres :-)
  - yxhuvud 8y ago
    Mongo support acid transactions nowadays, so the reason for vitriol has lessened a lot. I like my explicit db schema though.
resource0x 8y ago
The chances that YOU, when you reach same age, will be interested in pushing the envelope with the latest tech, are very low. The chances that you will find "latest tech" absurd and would rather be starving than pushing said envelope, are very high. When I was young, I couldn't even imagine the future with Spring framework, Hibernate, Angular, AWS configuration etc. The profession is dead for me, and has been dead for quite some time. This is my own anecdotal evidence, sorry.
- potta_coffee 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gerbilly 8y ago

> I also noticed that older programmers tend to not be as up to date in newer technologies or ways of doing things. I've been doing this a long time and it doesn't matter to me. The newer stuff is most of the time just a variation on a theme that I've seen turnover three or four times since i've been doing this. What older coders have that younger ones do not, is experience. This can often halve the workload on some projects. The older I get in this profession, the more results I get out of less and less code. Also, let's not immediately fetishize the newer stuff. It is often a less well implemented retread of older technology. Seems like people have less patience for learning existing systems, so they just re-write some quick and dirty replacement and call it good. Perhaps it might be better if younger programmers learned the old stuff instead of just badly reinventing the wheel every few years.

howard941 8y ago
This. And older engineers have finer bullshit detectors. ISTM ageism is real, and it's all about the money.
unclebucknasty 8y ago
>Perhaps it might be better if younger programmers learned the old stuff instead of just badly reinventing the wheel every few years. That's pure gold. Not to say there haven't been advances--there certainly have been. But, there's also the issue of the shininess of new tech giving it undue cred, while simultaneously translating to an outsized denigration of the tech it purports to replace. Frankly, a lot of these problems have been solved, and solved well. Look at NoSQL as an example. There are certainly use cases for it, but then people went nuts, exclaiming things like "RDBMS must die" and touting no ACID transactions as a feature/benefit. Then, you get the trickle of reports that maybe NoSQL wasn't the best choice for this or that. Finally, fast-forward to 2018 and you have announcements from MongoDB that they now support ACID transactions. Many older coders have seen enough of these cycles, and have adopted a justifiably-cynical posture of "wait for it...".
- 420codebro 8y ago
  No ACID as a feature - lol. "My car? Fuck the airbags, fuck the seatbelts! It is fast though!"

ergothus 8y ago

I certainly don't want to chime in with a detraction that misses your point, but I do feel there's a slight difference. (for context, I'm 42) I think the reason older coders don't "keep up" is because you have to lose ground first. If I want to adopt a new technology, I have to first learn how to handle problems I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO SOLVE with my current technologies. The better I am with solving the problems I encounter already, the more I will have to backpedal before I can go forward in a new tech. And while I definitely get better overall from learning a broader base of techs, over time there are definitely diminishing returns. The cost-benefit of learning something new vs spending that time either learning more of what I'm already in, or just solving any of the infinite things I want to get done is a balance that will slide more and more towards not bothering to learn new tech unless there's a real need. Add in that this is an industry rife with Imposter Syndrome that DEFINITELY bites you in the face during any moment of struggling to "get" a new tech, and there are plenty of incentives against embracing new tech beyond just "I don't like change". (though that is definitely present - I'm a JS dev currently, so I'm well familiar with the dismissive and arrogant attitudes that can be tossed around).

xtracerx 8y ago
I hear this from older developers a lot, that the problems we are solving today have been solved already. That may be true to some extent, but I think that is dangerous, the ways the problems are solved again have different characteristics and advantages and generally push the ball forward. I think of it like forest fires clearing out old grown for new, and I think it's best to just have a zen-like mindset of being a constant beginner.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I completely agree. I'm not giving a rant about society re-inventing the wheel, I'm talking at a personal level. If I know language X, but I'm trying to learn language Y, I have to learn how to do things that I already know how to do in X. It's a change that HAS to happen to learn, and I'll walk away a better coder, but that doesn't make the process of relearning any more enjoyable or more productive. I switched jobs recently and tried to adopt a zen-like attitude of beginners mind. It definitely helped...but I'd be lying if I said I never hit frustration points where I'm trying to go from A to C but I have to learn all about B when I don't WANT to care about B, I want to get to C. A good attitude helps, but I think the underlying reason is still true and is part of why experienced devs aren't adopting new tech at the rate of newer devs.

GordonS 8y ago

I don't know; anecdotally, these days it seems things are not quite like that anymore. I'm pushing 40, and like reggae, acid jazz, electronic. I keep up to date (as far as one can) with tech, programming, cloud and the like. It's not just me - it feels like a lot of older people around me don't match the old stereotypes. Older colleagues are learning Typescript, my grandmother reads erotica... Youth culture is of course always changing, but older people are perhaps more liberal than they used to be, and don't feel like they need to behave a certain way any more more.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> ...my grandmother reads erotica... I'm proud of your grandmother, but TMI, man. TMI.
potta_coffee 8y ago
It's not just you. The youngsters in tech are blatantly ageist. They'll be singing a different tune when they're 40 and the generation behind is already chiseling out their headstones.

dv_dt 8y ago

There is a problem of equating being "up to date" with "competent for the position". Up to date might mean you know how to work in the syntax & convention of the stack of interest, but that's largely independent of the level of competence for overall software development & discipline. If an older programmer is solid on the latter, getting up to date really isn't a large amount of time. It's harder to assess, just like its hard to assess in interviews even if the engineer is "up to date" - look at the perennial debate on how best to interview candidates.

jiggliemon 8y ago

If you think newer “technology” (re: programming language or framework) is superior to older “technology” – you are likely agist, and part of the problem.

781 8y ago
So you think that someone saying that Python or C++ is superior to COBOL is ageist.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  Depending on the context yes. If your bank has some COBOL systems running to keep accounts up to date, do you really want some team of pinheads to 'fix it' by porting it to python?

magduf 8y ago

>The hate new music That's a different issue. New music really is garbage; the entire industry has changed over the last several decades. There's a reason so many younger people are listening to classic rock.

gerbilly 8y ago
Everyone has different tastes, but there is some nice new music out there. This for example: http://www.hawaiianreggae.org/artists http://www.hawaiianreggae.org/artists Nice and mellow, lots of young new artists. It's a pretty good scene.
- magduf 8y ago
  These days, to find new music that's actually any good, you have to look really hard, and everything that isn't mainstream has really veered off into very different directions (meaning any given artist/subgenre probably won't appeal to you). It isn't like the "old days" when the mainstream music was actually good. There's a reason all those rockers from the 70s and 80s (and some 60s!) are still touring.
  - 781 8y ago
    Your comment hilariously proves the point. Ask the kids what they think about today's mainstream music. They will say it's amazing. Who do you think drives the charts? Yes, yes, I know, you are or you know a couple youngsters who think anything newer than Pink Floyd is shit. And you think that the charts are not organic, they are "marketing", where the record label pay to get entry and rank.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
renaudg 8y ago
Sorry, but this is spoken like a true curmudgeon. Can I ask where it is you live to see hordes of young people finding solace in classic rock (or any sort of purely guitar-based music) ? Except maybe in US rural communities where it's all about country music (always has been, always will be) those days are well and truly over. "Nobody wants an electric guitar anymore" : https://qz.com/1013293/rock-and-roll-is-dead-sales-of-fender-and-gibson-electric-guitars-prove-it/ https://qz.com/1013293/rock-and-roll-is-dead-sales-of-fender... Meanwhile electronic music has taken millenials by storm. Tomorrowland festival sold out nearly 400.000 tickets in 40 minutes a few weeks ago. Same kind of numbers every year for Electric Daisy Carnival in the US. Never in history has there been so much quality music released every day in all genres, because musicians can now do so without the gatekeepers of the past, much like Youtube has shattered the TV networks. The consequence of that is that it's all about fragmented niches and discovery can be challenging. But there is gem after gem in my Spotify "Weekly Discovery" playlist. There has never been a more exciting time to be a music lover !

unclebucknasty 8y ago

>I also noticed that older programmers tend to not be as up to date in newer technologies or ways of doing things. Serious consideration: I wonder how the cost of "older programmers not being as up to date" compares to the cost of younger programmers too quickly adopting newer technologies.

DanBC 8y ago

> That's not the point, I'm talking about distributions not individual cases. But you're not talking about distributions. You talk about the individuals you meet in interviews.

waynecochran 8y ago

As an older software engineer (52) I have developed a good sense of what "new technology" has a fleeting "here today and gone tomorrow" lifespan. I have seen a lot come and go. This is especially true now with "web tech" which I quit paying a lot of attention to because it so ephemeral. It is my math background and numerical computing (e.g., optimization) skills that keep me ahead of the pack. Only the best of the younger generation will keep up with me. Learn things that will be important for forever. Life is a breath and then we are gone.

PorterDuff 8y ago
From the get off my lawn crowd (60) I don't mind being pushed out mostly because the work doesn't look that interesting at this point. I managed for 38 years with nothing in the way of languages (C, C++ when it became available, a whole bunch of assembly languages for exotic processors) by modern standards. Most of the heavy lifting in the workstation and high end embedded world was algorithmic. All they are is dust in the wind.
- souprock 8y ago
  That is great experience, particularly "a whole bunch of assembly languages for exotic processors". Here, a job listing for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153 Within 10 years here I had encountered more than 10 different CPU architectures. I've lost count now, but it is probably at least a dozen. The same goes for OSes.

robseed 8y ago

45, certain "trap music" is a typo

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_music https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_music But...it was popular in the late 90s, which corresponds to us mid-40 age people anyways.

xorcist 8y ago

> It's just the classic "older people tend to be more conservative" fact. Can we please kill this myth already? That was extraordinary so during the era when social changes swept through society, but someone who spent their formative years during the 70s will hardly regard today's society anything else than an extension of the changes which took place then. There are many different ways to act conservatively. Resistance to new ideas because "but we've always done it this way" is a lot more common with people whose definition of "always" stretches to five (maybe ten) years. > Electron anyone? Well, let's put it this way: Most ideas are bad. But you can't dismiss all ideas on that statistical ground, because then you would miss the really good ones.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]