Age shouldn't be used as a catch all filter, but I can see how it might be faster to screen those who have been too content to stick to their tools without catching up to industry trends.
You might want to check your own bias in favor of functional programming. To the more seasoned programmers this is just the latest fad. That's not to say there isn't value in it, but if you're making hiring decisions around it you've probably got your head in the clouds.
I'm not sure if I'd want to hire someone who is unable to point out valid criticisms of the technology stack I'm using.
People need to be aware of the limitations of their tools. I spent years in pure C, both complaining about it and singing its praises. Right now I'm in JS land, and I can do the same thing.
I started off in C#. No real complaints there, except for the lack of stack alloc, and that got added in the most recent version. :-D
I only interviewed a few of candidates for developer roles a couple of times and this was one of the questions I asked, managed to get some interesting, constructive responses as well as some well-crafted bullshit.
I learned this after I told the interviewer that I thought that PHP was a crap language, when interviewing for a PHP developer position.
Working in a PHP shop, nobody would care to shit on PHP during an interview. We know the shortcommings, it just doesn’t really matter that much.
I happen to like the one language to rule them all (JS).
They're just biases that haven't a good justification. I usually keep this sort of bias to myself because I recognize it for what it is. Honestly though I wouldn't apply for such positions, either, so the bias problem never surfaces.
how is this type of attitude not sufficient reason to not bother hiring someone? I immediately don't want to work with or for you.
I know this. And I wouldn't want to work with JS devs. At all. It's a win-win for all of us that I don't apply to those positions.
It’s a sign of a bad attitude.
One can be blunt without displaying a trashy attitude, and it doesn’t take that much effort. Most people tell me that I am the most blunt person they know in that I will give some of the most honest observations whether they are uncomfortable or not. I also have a reputation of being one of the nicest people many people know, never needing to put down one group of people to appease another, probably one of the biggest engineering productivity killers one can create (negative politics, cliques, etc.). Engineers often will vent to me (coworkers, teammates, people from various programming communities, etc.), and I lend a sympathetic ear to all, which in turn builds trust, comraderie, and helps use my knowledge & experiences to help guide responses & resolutions to situations generating stress to a healthy outcome for all.
It shouldn’t take much effort to treat each person with respect & humanity - if it does, one should look inwards at maybe something being wrong with oneself than to other people, and work on culling out the toxic attitude.
I'm more likely to ride on the bleeding edge (Node 8, Webpack 3, Babel 7) than most. I am afraid though, in under a decade it will be an uphill battle to find work (I'm 43 at the end of the month).
Maybe the trend is web assembly with Rust now or something. Or Ethereum contracts and R are cool. I dunno but trends do matter.
Anyway JavaScript is less trendy but still very popular and there are a ton of crap codebases built up over recent years. So any of those that don't get scrapped for a trendier technology will be looking to recruit experienced people to fix up their crap (maybe adding TS declarations for everything or something like that).