I'm not an "old" programmer (I don't think... I did have an intern ask me one time if I had ever worked with punch cards, so maybe I am...). This article plays

I'm not an "old" programmer (I don't think... I did have an intern ask me one time if I had ever worked with punch cards, so maybe I am...). This article plays off a stereotype that I don't think it particularly helpful (or accurate). I've worked with experienced engineers who are all about the RDBMS, but I've also come across young engineers that don't know about anything more than RDBMSs because their university didn't teach them any more than that. I've worked with young engineers who were reluctant to go out of their comfort zone (and by that, I mean work in the JavaScript layer of the Java webapp they were working on), and I've worked with a whole team of really experienced engineers who had spent their whole career doing C/C++ who decided to build a product on Node.js. I would agree with the point that having a diversity of backgrounds and perspective can be helpful on a software team. We need people who keep asking "why" on a team, and we need people with historical background. But to assume engineers are a particular way because they are old are young is (1) not accurate and (2) setting a large part of the population up to not meet your assumed expectations.