Stories like this one terrify me. No matter how young you are today, someday not too long from now you'll be 40+ and on the receiving end of this type of discrimination. Is that the kind of industry we want to be?
- case 1: a guy in his fifties writing C++ like it's C with classes in the same style he did 20 years ago. Every piece of code is a complete trainwreck. I could go on for hours on how bad it is. Anyway, the programs he creates like that sort of work. Barely. But because there isn't anyone else to do his job, managment is stupid and too lazy to find someone else and rather waits until it explodes in their faces (i.e. when he retires), he can stay. Until one day a new manager steps in and immediately sees the problem and lets the guy go. Would you really call this discrimination or rather the proper thing to do?
- case 2: the opposite. Decent guy in his fifties, hard working, always learning, writing proper code, not afraid to speak up. The letter eventually yielding him fired because (again) of stupid managment: one manager able to convince the rest he's too old and too costly too keep, rest of the pack too lazy too stand up and just let it happen.. That is discrimination.
Experienced guy in his 50's, seen it all before. Remembers the era of object databases, knows why SQL was invented, and shuts down his hipster colleague's plans to use Mongodb. Remembers CORBA, SOA and J2EE and is skeptical about microservices. Understands why logging/metrics/dependency injection is necessary and pushes RoR guys to use more verbose syntax to support it.
Younger folks dislike him because of this. There is conflict. Management has a real problem, since they both need experience but the senior guy can't build everything on his own.
There are also arguments for NoSQL dbs as well, some times old knowledge is exactly that.
This doesn't seem to be a compelling example... But alas, I think I've taken this off topic.
Disclaimer: not a RoR guy.
Dependency injection isn't about unit tests. Dependency injection is about weak dependencies, easier refactoring, and preventing bad design decisions from being a disaster 5 years down the line. Dependency injection is a good idea no matter what the language/framework is.
That's the point of the parent comment. A dev in his 50s would point these things out.
In terms of architecture, it's usually a case of YAGNI. Every dependency injected is a configuration point that is almost never altered, except for mocks in testing. When this style infects a whole codebase, it makes it far harder to read and navigate, because code flow is dependent on runtime data flow. Heavy use of indirections that only ever go to the one place is a bad code smell, and it's a stench over the entire field of enterprise Java.
Code that is easy to read is easy to refactor. Except for natural architectural chokepoints that are typically intrinsic to the problem being solved, you're fooling yourself if you don't think architecture changes are needed for most refactoring - dependency injection isn't buying you what you think you're buying. Every injection point you create is a prediction about the future, about the possibilities of change, but there's one gotcha: the future is hard to predict, so most of your decisions are wrong.
You're better off being agile, following YAGNI, doing the simplest thing that will work, and altering it when requirements change.
DI tends to work great for the integration point between systems - e.g., connecting the REST or Thrift interface to the calculation backend and datastore.
The fact that a concept is hard to use in Enterprise Java is a poor argument against anything other than Enterprise Java.
On the other hand, DI frameworks are a "modern" way to do global objects. I have no clue what problem they solve or why using a DI framework is a good idea. I've had the "pleasure" to work with a Java DI framework project last week, it turned 10 lines of code into 300 lines of boilerplate spread around 3 different packages.
Furthermore, I agree, the pervasive use of mocks is a smell. The point of tests is to have test suite T.A to validate module A. Littering the test base with mocks of A which don't pass the test suite T.A is just a recipe for pain, both semantically and as increasing the amount of code change required by a refactoring. A is changing? Go chase the 100 mocks that make their own assumptions about A and fix them. Your tests are now part of the liability under change instead of being the safety net that tells you whether your module B depending on A is still working.
You can achieve weak dependencies, easy refactoring and bad design without DI (Maybe it's harder in java to do thought :\ ).
The magic question of DI is, how do you decide what is a dependency worth injecting vs a static/strong dependency? In my experience its: "Inject everything". Which leads convoluted code. The correct answer (imo) is "you can't, unless you can predict the future".
a) Silicon Valley is notorious for its implicit ageism
b) Once I'm 40 and have 4 years of experience working in start-ups I'll be dismissed from either getting hired or getting funded because I'm old.
The only thing that makes this topic worthy of upvoting is because people identify a company doing things an entire culture does. Sure you can bring a lawyer and pull a company to the court (good luck proving that they discriminated you based on age) but a culture? How do you even do that? You can't.
This is why I find it hypocritical that people act appalled on the idea that a company is doing what everyone admits a culture does but for the company is punishable and "well deserved" to be punished for it. In fact, I imagine there will be some sort of standing ovation somewhere in the world when an ageism case is won against ANY Microsoft, whereas for the culture is just "how things are" and it's your job to avoid it.
Funny, isn't it?
The times have changed anyways. Most people won't be working at the same company for most of their lives and to me that seems like a bad investment anyways. It's time that people (especially in IT) start shaping their own future.