I blame the myth that young hackers are somehow strangely more knowledgeable than their elders because of the putatively ever-changing nature of technology. I've always been suspicious of this self-serving narrative (in what other engineering field is this true?), but as I approach what passes for Old Fartness in this industry (30) now I <i>know</i> it's bullshit.<p>All the twenty-year-old whizzes I know are experts at taking something like Ruby on Rails, trading in the quality of the underlying framework to put together a hack-job very quickly, and then promptly getting themselves stuck in a morass that they can't get out of because they don't even understand why they are in a morass. Hand these people something with a lot of technical assets they can borrow against and yeah, they can toss something together fast, but that's hardly "better" then what I can do now, which is actually <i>produce</i> technical value.<p>(Mind you, I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. There's a time and a place for that. What <i>is</i> a bad thing is that the developer won't understand the tradeoffs they just made, and probably didn't make the tradeoff after a sober and careful balancing of the costs and benefits, but did it because it's all they know.)<p>Anyhow, my point is that thanks to that mythology, a lot of younger people don't think they <i>can</i> be mentored by the old farts they think know nothing in this rapidly changing technical environments. The old farts (at least the ones who have ten years of experience and not one year of experience ten times) have learned that frankly, the tech world <i>isn't</i> changing that fast (different languages, different APIs, pretty much the same messes). There's plenty of mentoring to be done, but you gotta accept that the mentors are going to tell you some things that may shattered your treasured conceptions of the programming world....