> The older I get the more I realize how these old curmudgeons were often right. They've been there to witness the cycles of technology and aren't impressed with the shiny new ones that are often worse than the old ones. They aren't interested in the cloud because it's modern day mainframes for instance.

This is actually one of my biggest career problems. I mean, it's an advantage, too... I can pretty quickly understand new things, because they are similar to old things, but... on an emotional level part of me rebels from the new cool thing simply because the old thing worked, often more reliably, and this new thing? this new thing has a bunch of little subtle differences and bugs that I have to learn and deal with and fix, just like the old thing had a decade ago, so my natural reaction to the latest fad is usually a negative emotional response, and pointing out that it's essentially the same thing as the old thing.

This causes obvious problems, of course, with the people who got promoted for "demonstrating complexity" when they wrote or implemented the new system.

I need to learn to point out the similarities to the thing I know, but to do so without the negativity, because, uh, cultural fit. (so bitter!)

>They aren't interested in the cloud because it's modern day mainframes for instance.

This is the opposite of true. Mainframes were all about complete reliability; you can always rely on the hardware, or at least that's what you are paying for. "The cloud" is all about the chaos monkey, about writing your application to deal with any server failing (or returning nonsense) at any time.

The disillusionment with "the cloud" comes from having to deal with managers who think that "the cloud" means reliability, when it really means "write your applications so they can deal with hardware that is significantly less reliable than hardware managed by in-house sysadmins"