[lewiscollard]

Don't limit it to the younger developers: we're all doing that all the time! Always have all our lives. We learn a lot of things by imitating, then understanding, then building on that. I mean, I learned English from my mother at a very young age (who was following the best practices of the 1950s) without understanding any of the underlying principles. :)

Likewise, some of the "kids these days" (literally what I call the rest of my much younger development team, and they're just as capable about poking me about my age :)) may be doing that in tech in their early-ish careers. I think it'd be underestimating younger devs to apply that too broadly, because I've seen too many little gems of genius from younger devs.

The way I see my role leading a younger team is to help the folks somewhat younger than me learn from some of the lessons I have learned: to spot code that is going to be a nightmare in the long run, to maybe gain my weird knack of being able to tell people what their bug is without even seeing the code. But they also have a valuable role in teaching me to be less conservative (disposition, not politics) when I should not be, or coming up with brilliant solutions that I was blind to.

If I had a point, it's that there's room in the world for all of us, and that both the old motherfuckers and the Kids These Days have a lot to bring to the table to build up each other. I hope this was useful in some way. :)