The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders
I&#x27;ve been doing some job interviewing lately, at 37.<p>I do find that companies seem to know how to evaluate young programmers: just test them on their knowledge of your tech stack. Any young coder who is good and is working in that stack will know the basics. The bad ones won&#x27;t.<p>For older coders, I&#x27;m not sure that same signal works. I&#x27;ve forgotten more frameworks than most coders will ever learn. I mostly don&#x27;t care about programming languages, they&#x27;re roughly the same and I can learn a new one in a couple weeks.<p>I know technologies like Rails and SQL, but I don&#x27;t play with the new toys as much as I used to, becuase lately I would rather solve a new problem or build a new tool than learn a new tool.<p>But how do you evaluate a coder on their ability to solve problems? Much harder.<p>Even more  difficult, how do you get a 24 year old coder who only knows react and FireBase to evaluate a 37 year old coder who has built web frameworks from scratch?<p>It&#x27;s another world, and a lot of companies just don&#x27;t bother.<p>Thankfully I have no desire to work at any of those companies. I solve problems. If a company can&#x27;t hire for that I don&#x27;t belong there. There are plenty of companies trying to hire people to solve actual problems, not just put coder butts in seats.