Wow, better check that bias.

So "My only concern hiring older engineers is that they are stuck in a rut." doesn't come across well, anyone reading this should be very clear that to adopt that thinking when interviewing would be very lazy on your part!

Not trying to bash you personally, and I suspect you just didn't express what you meant so well :)

It's almost like it would be great if we knew what changes were good and what changes were bad before we started arguing about them. Any ideas???

Small teams of 2-3 people spending a few days for testing out a new idea, or writing a prototype, may often work out.

One of my central theses is 'Its almost impossible for people to determine what's true and equally as impossible to get them to admit it'.

Every single case you point out each actor thinks they are doing the right thing. Nobody knows what they are doing aside from one of those cases. The caveat being they have to fight against everyone else who believe they are also correct.

This all feeds into another central thesis 'the truth is at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of "nice to haves"'

And what is an example of tech that non-rut folks have that rut folks don't have?

I’m pushing 50 and know many older engineers. An occupational hazard is getting complacent and ceasing to evolve and learn as an ongoing part of one’s career. This is a hazard with life in general as people get older, but if we’re not wary of it, it can have professional consequences too.

As far as what does it look like- they go to a new team or employer, which naturally has different tools and practices and technical domains, and they expend titanic amounts of effort to continue working just like they used to in the new surroundings, rather than simply making an effort to adapt and learn new skills.

I’m not saying this is a common problem when hiring older engineers, just something we all have to grapple with as we age. I think that’s all that was meant by a rut. Resistance to all change, regardless of whether that change is good or bad.

As a mentioned previously we’ve found a lot of senior sw candidates who have 20+ years experience working on a huge legacy technology in a huge beaurocratic organization. Some of those people have no problem applying their experience and skills to general software engineering efforts. However others are only fluent and comfortable in that one legacy technology and are not really experienced in the fundamentals. A surprising number of those people exist. That’s who we want to avoid.

Skills we do want are: ability to apply fundamentals to general solutions, ability to consider the costs of various approaches, ability to plan and architect, ability to organize well, ability to communicate well, ability to learn, etc.

'The Prince' has a whole chapter about wheter employing mercenary soldiers can be considered a good thing. And he gets into the conclusion that mercenaries must be the last kind of resource you want to employ in an army, and that is better to avoid them.

To stitch this with what we are talking about here, in my experience, people that get stuck in a given technology are more conservative types, who do just enough to fit in a given position, and make it as solid as possible, so to garantee their paychecks by the end of the month, and to be perceived as a perfect fit for that position, and consolidate the job for years to come. Its on-pair with mercenary because, theres no cause or love for the tecnology, for what we can achieve with it, but those values get corrupted when they clash with a solid and continuous source of income.

More inovative people are more bold, and take more risks, but a lot of companies wont like them, and they wont be perceived as a good fit for the company (in their speech of course they do, but not in real life).

I guess the first, is more of the profile you are saying you are trying to avoid. And i think thats good, because this profile tend to have a more parasitic relationship with the company. If your company moves faster, maybe they wont make a good fit in that sort of environment.

Also its good to avoid people that have a tendency to game things. There a lot of people in this world, that dont care much about anything else and just do enough to understand the game of a given system and score enough to win in that sort of game consolidating its own position. (For instance, that puzzle based hiring interview iss being gamed right now, and companies are not hiring what they think they do right now.. humans will adapt to the games til they mean nothing anymore)

A good fit for a Astronaut for instance, is that kid that was dreaming about the space, and will do everything to make this dream come true. When theres a real problem, or something that requires real passion to be done, that 'kid' will make the difference.

Nothing can work as a suplementary replacement for real passion.

(From someone that has real passion, and cant understand how people can live without it)

Sorry, but most employers essentially "game things": they extract as much value as they can out of you in return for the smallest amount of compensation they can get away with giving you. Yet I don't see you being critical of managers and CEOs, just other engineers. Managers love it when engineers getting into pissing matches about "passion", hackathons, which stack is most l33t, etc. (Erik Dietrich's term "carnival cash" comes to mind.) Meanwhile that business major 10 years your junior with a PMP certificate they got online -- and who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag -- just got promoted to senior project manager and gets to tell you what to do.

By 40, to put it in high-level abstract terms, the most important thing is figuring out what you need to be doing so you're earning the compensation you want/need and living the lifestyle you actually want to live. The "game" that other engineers around us in the marketplace are playing, so to speak, is the one having to do with optimizing compensation and quality of life. I can choose to walk onto the court and play a different game -- one with rules I personally feel are more noble, or something -- but that won't change the external reality around me, and nobody will care, except employers looking to take advantage of engineers willing to prioritize "passion" over things like "compensation" or "spending time with my kids" or "adequate health insurance".

Note: I'm riffing somewhat on the ideas David Sirlin presents in the first chapter of his book called "Playing to Win"; worth a read: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

Edit: in fact, I'll just quote from Sirlin:

A scrub is not just a bad player. Everyone needs time to learn a game and get to a point where they know what they're doing. The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can't get over these common hangups, in a sense you've lost before you even started. You've lost before you even picked which game to play. You aren't playing to win.

A scrub would disagree with this though. They'd say they are trying very hard. The problem is they are only trying hard within a construct of fictitious rules that prevent them from ever truly competing.

The recipe here, is that you create a untrue image of a "Emerald City", where everything is possible for the people that work hard, show them the great Wizard of Oz as a example of what you can acomplish, and wait the dreamers like Dorothy to pile over in order to fulfill their dreams. You will have hard-working, starry-eyed workers accepting almost anything.

Sure, the Big Corp™ also use a gaming system to its own advantage, making a feist from the naive.

It's ok to be skeptic when in your environment they actually swallow the dreamer type. We always need to be smart, detect what's really going on and adapt to the environment.

Sometimes you just wasnt lucky to find a good fit for you. But whatever happened its good to survive not only the outside world, but to fight for your inner fire. The thing that will make you move on with a sense of purpose. But of course you shouldnt let people take advantage of that, and a lot of people will actually try, not only professionally.

They had been working on the specific codebase for over a year, fwiw.

IMHO, from the outside, senior developer rut looks like a fear/resistance to change or learning. I'm not sure if what is really going on inside, though. Probably career burnout.

I am the around same age as the guys I'm referring to here, fwiw. So, it's more than just physiological aging.

We use a mix of older and newer technologies. We try to identify the “best” solution where best is a function of: implementation cost (time and dollars), technical debt, learning curve, future extensibility, performance, simplicity, and personal intellectual interest.

Avoiding a gendered word would avoid this confusion.

a) People vary hugely in the extent to which they find irl interaction helpful. You can’t make a single statement like this and claim that it applies equally to everyone.

b) Huge value to whom?