I think I'm mostly of the opinion these days that there is no such thing as an "outdated technology". There are technologies that are no longer fit for purpose but that is almost never because of their age. It nearly always because of one of as examples: Needing to run in an environment it can't support, Having bugs that are not getting fixed/no longer maintained, Missing features necessary to solve new problems or add new features, Hitting scale limits.

Outdated may sometimes be a euphemism for one of the above but usually when I see it in a discussion it just means "old" or "out of fashion" instead.

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amonith 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd also add "there are almost no developers using it on the job market" to the list why some technologies are no longer fit for purpose. It's a major one. Sort of tied to the ecosystem (no devs - not many things get mantained/created).

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zaphar 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I do think that holds more water than just "It's old".

However for pretty much any dev I would hire for a job they can get to grips with a technology that's older pretty quickly. Where it does get dicey is when good dev just refuses to work with it. For those devs, I think, when they hold that opinion it typically means one of those other reasons is behind their refusal.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>one of those other reasons is behind their refusal.

I mean, one of those reasons is "When I leave this job will I be able to get another job" is a huge deeply life affecting one.

If you want me to work on COBOL from 1988 then you've limited my work prospects to one of a very few employers in the country at a very specific pay range. If I instead tell you to eat a fat one and go with $language_de_jour the number of employers and potential salary range is much, much larger.

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zaphar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why does working in one technology prevent you from getting a job in another one?

	▲	amonith an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Haven't you seen job offers where X years of experience in XYZ is a must? It's like most of them. Never got one without this actually. Gotta have this experience from somewhere. I know devs like to say they would hire anyone, but they're not the ones hiring. At best you get to interview people already prefiltered by HR which... looks for keywords in CV.