45 year old programmers most likely have seen everything come around the block more than a few times in their careers and realize fads / crap ideas when they see them. E.g. Yet another build system
I work with a 42 year old and by far he's the person I've learned the most from even though he "still uses Perl" (I love Perl btw) and I'm trying to convince him to learn Git and abandon CVS.
Exactly, and it's a big reason why some places are reluctant to hire them. They'll rain on your parade faster than anyone else, and people don't like to have their parade rained on.
But difficult, if not impossible, to prove and costly to try to attack.
The age difference is often not even really a conscious thing. It is expressed in "cultural fit" by most young interviewers. Older devs simply are detached from core pieces of younger culture. Whether that's music, integration into workplace rhythms, lanugage, etc.
It's important to specialize some, get broad technically (don't only know everything COBOL), and to force yourself to at least understand the hot new things enough to be able to speak FROM EXPERIENCE about why you want said hot new thing off your lawn... but still be willing to play along.
If you need to work for someone else, you need to balance your tech-righteousness with someone else's, often youthfully naive, ego.
> The age difference is often not even really a conscious thing.
It can even be as simple as a work schedule that is hard to meet for anyone with children. E.g. shifting the start and end of the work day one hour later can be enough to make childcare a nightmare to secure many places.
