But I kept that for myself despite the itch to insist on telling him to use the damn shortcut instead of going to the menu each time. After all, he was as productive as the younger ones as far as quantity was concerned, and more productive as far as quality was concerned.
Your mouse thing is funny, it makes me think of touch typing evangelist maniacs. They probably allot a specific budget for spare backspace keys. In my experience, that's the key they use the most.
Are you sure? I had a coworker who was a fellow Smalltalk consultant. At the time he was just out of college and in his 20's, but he deliberately didn't use any OS keyboard shortcuts. Our company's development environments ran transparently cross platform on eight different OS, so to keep himself from stumbling when out in the field, he only used the cross platform UI commands.
So perhaps your coworker didn't want to spend extra effort on Ctrl-C Ctrl-V because he wanted to preserve muscle memory for another system? (OS X?) Did he normally work in Emacs? Or maybe he's just jaded.
But I kept that for myself despite the itch to insist on telling him to use the damn shortcut instead of going to the menu each time. After all, he was as productive as the younger ones as far as quantity was concerned, and more productive as far as quality was concerned.
Good on you! It's the output that matters. And if one can't have a modicum of patience while collaborating/pair programming, then that's a sure sign of an opportunity to learn something valuable and powerful.
touch typing evangelist maniacs. They probably allot a specific budget for spare backspace keys. In my experience, that's the key they use the most.
I'm constantly amazed at the degree to which young people in the Bay Area pay attention to preference signalling. It's like they think it's some sort of divine oracle or moral imperative in and of itself!
What I'm referring to is people whose skills are all in, say, Microsoft C based GUI programming and who have not updated their skills at all. They're stuck on one tool and that tool is old.
You see younger devs who get stuck on tools too, but their tools are more likely to be up to date and therefore their skills are more marketable.
How do you know this? Have you been in a good position to evaluate the performance of many older devs? If so, how much diversity in languages/environments is in your sample?
Most of the negative attention I've gotten from younger devs in work settings has been in the form of constant interruptions for me to use keyboard shortcuts. 1) It's very disruptive to the discussion at hand. 2) It's never been an actual problem. 3) It's always couched in impatient and negative emotional tones. 4) It makes it harder for others to follow what you are doing, if you are always concentrating so hard at going fast. 5) It's always seemed like a pointless attempt by young people to seem like fake hackers on TV.
Chris Granger famously observed that programmers who said "I never use the mouse" use it about 50% of the time they're actively programming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995235