>on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation
Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day.
One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away.
But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs.
Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.
Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day.
One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away.
But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs.
Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.