We need young programmers; We need old programmers
I am under 30. I find it very frustrating and unfair to see older programmers being displaced or misstreated because 1) I need to squeeze out every damn ounce of wisdom these people have in order to accelerate my own progress and 2) one day I&#x27;ll be in their place. I want them to be treated the same way I will be treated.<p>I have a real life example of the five monkeys story. A company I used to work for had a pile of legacy systems in php4, mysql 5.0 and a frontend working only on IE8, no ci&#x2F;cd, no tests. Almost instantly I was lead to beleive this system is a black hole that can&#x27;t be saved due to the technical difficulties plus management issues. The head of IT was there for almost 20 years watching tons of developers contribute to this mess and failing to take meaningful action to address the problem. Thus he had insane clarity of all the problems, but also was pesimistic about any possitive outcome. With his experience on these systems and my determination (probably stemming from my youth) we managed to upgrade php to 5.6 (almost compatible with 7), mysql 5.5 and most of the front end could work on latest chrome in a year (+ a great deal of performance optimizations). We both left that place having layed out a solid foundation for the people who were left behind to continue this modernization endavour (which I&#x27;ve learned was carried on)