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Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. It’s sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers as more open-minded.

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> The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions.

so, people with experience?

ive been programming for more than 40 years

Obviously. Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation.

In hindsight it makes sense, I’m sure every major shift has played out the same way.

> Turns out experience can be self-limiting in the face of paradigm-shifting innovation.

It also turns out that experience can be what enables you to not waste time on trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises. You are simply assuming that AI is a paradigm shift rather than a waste of time. Fine, but at least have the humility to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree on this point instead of labeling everyone who disagrees with you as some out of touch fuddy-duddy.

I'm not assuming anything, I'm relying on my own experience of being an engineer for two decades and building stuff for all kinds of organizations in all kinds of stacks and languages. AI has radically increased my velocity and quality, though it's got a steep learning curve of its own, and many frustrations to deal with. But it's pretty obviously a paradigm shift, and not "trendy stuff which will never deliver on its promises". Even if the current LLMs never improve at all from here, they're still incredibly useful tools.

Do you mean people who have been through several hype cycles and know their nature and how new novel tech, no matter how useful, takes time to be integrated and understood?

Get over yourself, and try to tone down the bigotry and stereotyping.

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