Comment by quotemstr
13 years ago
> experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time
I'm 28, which means I'm young enough that even people like you believe I can learn new tricks. As far as I can tell, my brain is still fully functional. That said, most of what I use every day, I learned over ten years ago. Computer science never gets old. The notion of indirection is never obsolete. The mental machinery required to navigate up and down in an abstraction hierarchy is universal. Sure, I learn new APIs every day, read about new programming paradigms (hey, functional reactive programming is cool), and so on, but I learned all the basics way back when.
Would you say that all my older experience is worthless? If your hypothesis were correct, I should be able to say that what I'm learning now is more important than what I learned in 1998, and that's just not true.
Even technology-wise, a lot of the knowledge you got 10 years ago could still be applicable. For example, as a result of having learned webdev in the '90s, I actually know how to manipulate the DOM and work around cross-browser issues even when jQuery isn't available, which it is my impression a lot of professionals have no clue about these days. Similarly, I learned Objective-C and Cocoa about a decade ago, and I know others with grayer beards than mine who learned it almost a decade before that — I would say that experience is actually more valuable in the modern development landscape than it was back then.
Most of the cool new programming paradigms are pretty old. I learned Haskell about 15 years ago and its taken the cool kids years to discover it...
I bet the "inventor" of the "cloud" thought it was some new discovery too. Those of us useless 40+ people with evil kids and no skills left know different, and smile...
What were the older incarnations of the cloud?
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If anything, one of the main complaints I read between the line of the original post was a lack of senior devs keeping the juniors in check.