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by altano 3613 days ago
Neither Ruby on Rails nor NodeJS has existed for 14 years.
2 comments

She was simplifying; most likely she meant:

"I have 14 years of commercial experience overall, with recent emphasis in high-demand technologies like RoR and Node.js"

yet FORTRAN and COBOL do

and so do reams of magnetic tape around the Beltway

who will maintain old code? you?

The poster specifically mentioned 14 years with these technologies. The fact that there are technologies 14+ years old is irrelevant to this point.
You can parse that statement in a more favorable way. She has spent 14 years acquiring experience with relatively new (or newly popular) technologies.

So 14 years ago, she would have worked with a technology that is now slightly more than 14 years old--I'd guess C#, which is now 16 years old. Maybe 9 years ago, she worked with Ruby on Rails, which is now 10 years old. Maybe 6 years ago, she started on Node.js, which is now 7 years old. Even now, she is likely keeping an eye on HN to see what would be most useful to learn next.

In other words, she has been continuously jogging on the technology treadmill, rather than staking out a niche to ride out until retirement.

This is likely the only way to avoid moving to progressively stodgier and less interesting companies as you age. The young and hip companies use the young and hip tech stacks. Established companies wait to see whether the new thing can cut costs or increase revenues before migrating, and part of that equation is not paying a premium for specialist developers that are currently in high demand.