The HR departments and hiring managers in Silicon Valley have a challenge. They can’t ask an applicant’s age because their companies have lost brutal discrimination lawsuits over the years. Instead, they develop little tricks like tossing in an oblique reference to “The Brady Bunch” (“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”) and seeing if the candidate gets the joke. Candidates who chuckle are deemed a poor cultural fit and are tossed aside.
Alas, the computer industry has a strange, cultish fascination with new technologies, new paradigms, and of course, new programmers. It’s more fascination than reality because old tech never truly dies. Old inventions like the mainframe may stop getting headlines, but they run and run. As I write this, Dice shows more than five times as many jobs postings for the keyword "Cobol" (522) than "OCaml," "Erlang," and "Haskell" combined (11, 52, and 27, respectively).
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