I’d push back on this framing a bit. There's a subtle ageism baked into the assumption that someone who stepped away from day-to-day coding has "ancient skills" worth mocking.

Yes, specific frameworks and tooling knowledge atrophy without use, and that’s true for anyone at any career stage. A developer who spent three years exclusively in React would be rusty on backend patterns too. But you’re conflating current tool familiarity with engineering ability, and those are different things.

The fundamentals: system design, debugging methodology, reading and reasoning about unfamiliar code, understanding tradeoffs ... those transfer. Someone with deep experience often ramps up on new stacks faster than you’d expect, precisely because they’ve seen the same patterns repackaged multiple times.

If the person you’re describing was genuinely overconfident about skills they hadn’t maintained, that’s a fair critique. But "the actual engineers making jokes about his ancient skills" sounds less like a measured assessment and more like the kind of dismissiveness that writes off experienced people before seeing what they can actually do.

Worth asking: were people laughing because he was genuinely incompetent, or because he didn’t know the hot framework of the moment? Because those are very different things.

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Ronsenshi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This has nothing to do about ageism. This applies to any person of any age who has ego big enough to think that their knowledge of industry is relevant after they take prolonged break and be socially inept enough to brag about how they are still "in".

I don't disagree with your point about fundamentals, but in an industry where there seems to be new JS framework any time somebody sneezes - latest tools are very much relevant too. And of course the big thing is language changes. The events I'm describing happened in the late 00s-early 10s. When language updates picked up steam: Python, JS, PHP, C++. Somebody who used C++ 98 can't claim to have up to date knowledge in C++ in 2015.

So to answer your question - people were laughing at his ego, not the fact that he didn't know some hot new framework.

	▲	withinboredom an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I beg to differ. I started with C in the 90s, then C# in '05, then PHP in '12, then Go in '21. The things I learned in C still apply to Go, C#, and PHP. And I even started contributing to open source C projects in '24 ... all my skills and knowledge were still relevant. This sounds exactly like ageism to me, but I clearly have a different perspective than you.