I suppose I'm an older dev now, approaching 40. I've been building things online for 20+ years. When I was in my early 20s, I used to wonder about the nature of

I suppose I'm an older dev now, approaching 40. I've been building things online for 20+ years. When I was in my early 20s, I used to wonder about the nature of the premise: whether it was accurate, why it would happen, and so on. What I've observed in myself and others is that older people become dramatically wiser about wasted motion, effort, time. They acquire a greater respect for the value of energy and time. Not least of all because at 40 most things are more taxing physically than at 20. Your brain will tell you flat out: no, I don't want to burn my valuable time on that, I don't need it; I want to do this other more important thing with my time instead and I have to choose one or the other (having an experienced scope or overview of life and knowing that time investments are always choosing between competing things; as you get older you more fully realize how quickly life rolls by and that you will not get to do everything, so these choices become quite important). By 50 it's generally going to be true that you have more good days behind you than ahead of you, time becomes very important. I think older devs seek to avoid unnecessarily reinventing wheels whenever they can. They seek to avoid wasting time learning this technology when that technology they're already a master of will do just as well (and faster, they already know it). And as others have mentioned, they will inevitably also have been burned numerous times on watching tech come and go and having sunk time and effort into learning a thing that vanishes. You can't afford time hits as trivially at 40 as you (seemingly) could at 20. When you burn / waste a year at 20, it doesn't feel nearly as detrimental as if you do it at 40.