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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

> Stay fresh: I know a 69-year-old developer/contractor say to me, "2000 was pretty good but after that the work dried up — I guess they didn't need COBOL programmers anymore". He had never bothered to stay current.

This is one that a lot of people have trouble with. One of the best engineers I ever worked with was in his 60s at the time, and seems to have stopped learning new organizational systems sometime in the 1980s. Agile development processes were just newfangled bullshit to him.

He was hot shit at anything that required fine attention to detail, and implemented a distributed task system after I gave him a verbal thumbnail sketch. Correctly. The first time.

But I could see that his refusal to learn new things was interfering with his career all the same.

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what if they actually are newfangled bullshit? (a mere proposition, as fads fade. I merely ask you to entertain this proposal)

It sounds like another entity might be able to use his brain a bit more thoroughly.

> what if they actually are newfangled bullshit? (a mere proposition, as fads fade. I merely ask you to entertain this proposal)

That might be true and both you and he correct in every single way! But in this particular context it wouldn't have mattered one whit - he and I were working on a contracted project where the counterparty had mandated agile and it was written into the contract. It didn't matter if he liked or believed in agile methodologies. What mattered was whether he would learn them enough to be an effective team lead. He refused.

Quite often, new things are actually newfangled and universally less useful than extant tools. In such cases, I expect the wiser heads who can spot that to be able to clearly and compellingly make the case for why this is true in every scenario where one might consider using the new and inferior tool. He did not and could not.

Again, you're completely right. Lots of things are just value-free newfangled bullshit. There just might be a subtle distinction to be made between an old hand pronouncing something as such and it being an incontrovertible fact.

Funny note: the original paper for Waterfall had many agile concepts built into it, if you read more than the first page.

I specialize in modern Python and to some extent JavaScript. Necessary but not nearly sufficient to get hired these days.

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