> know that the field exists and what's different about it This is closer to what I was trying to get at regard skills. I don't give a flip if someone knows Ai

> know that the field exists and what's different about it This is closer to what I was trying to get at regard skills. I don't give a flip if someone knows Airflow, or DBT, or whatever. Besides, both of them are transitioning to the rear view mirror anyways. However I have found that it can be a surprisingly difficult jump for people to shift to directed graph based, data workflow thinking - some backgrounds more than others (side note: FP background tends to have no problem w/ models like pipeline oriented development) But the real issue is how many people just ossify over time. I don't necessarily care that they've been using the same Enterprise Java/XML/PHP/etc stack since the early Aughts. I care that they've turned off their brain in the process and have little to no knowledge of the world beyond it. I care that they haven't solved a hard problem in 15+ years, and instead have been making small, incremental changes all this time. I've been there myself, and it takes a lot of work to dig out of it. The thing an ideal older candidate would bring to the table is the ability to say "Oh yes, I've seen this concept 15 times over again. Here are the general pros of the approach, and here are the general cons. This new flavor patches over cons 4, 5, and 6 at the cost of losing pro 8. But we need to be careful about cons 2 & 3". The poor older candidate will state firmly that they've seen this all before and nothing new is happening here. There's a big difference between the two.