I smile a little when I hear young developers say these types of things. I want you to project yourself mentally into the future ten years. Do you think you'll be a better developer or a worse one? Do you think you'll suddenly get stupid, forget what you know, stop caring about your work? I didn't.

I can't speak for all older programmers, but here's what happened to me:

- I did actually stop caring about jumping on new technologies, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I saw that there's a new one every minute, and in 2 years people will start blaming each of them for their failure to produce good products with them and then jump to another technology that will give them another 2 years of cover before they have to explain why they're not producing well. Meanwhile, the technology I'm in that's 3 years old has nothing wrong with it, and there's still plenty of money to be made fixing all the crap code the early-adopters wrote.

- Yeah, startups value developers that can slap something together that sort of works. They don't value developers who can and will protect them from the mid-term failure that comes from building out a shaky prototype into a full product. No one talks about the startups that die from tech debt (https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1376985951055065093), just the ones that somehow manage to overcome it. And you never hear about the ones that build carefully, without fanfare, because that's not sexy.

- You're dead on that it gets old spending all your free time learning new technologies you know will be obsolete soon (see point 1). We develop other hobbies, have kids to take to soccer, have parents and grandparents that get old and need care, maybe even full-time care. Being a well-rounded person doesn't make you less of a developer. It might inspire you, though, to be way more productive in the same time. Which, guess what, makes you way more cost-effective than a younger developer who has no obligations so he can spend 12 or more hours a day working. Especially when you add in that the code built by a more experienced dev may well require much less maintenance down the road.

I'd also caution you against thinking that younger developers are more eager to learn. This may be a stereotype, but what I see is many younger developers only have a surface knowledge of things. So, yes, they know a little bit about a lot of things, but they often don't seem to truly understand it. They'll read a "best practice" on a site like Medium, and they don't have the understanding to realize it's just some guy writing a blog post and it may or may not be a best practice. It's just as likely to be someone "realizing" a tried and true actual best practice that happens to feel inconvenient isn't necessary anymore. Such posts get a lot of share, retweets, etc., because it makes people feel like they know something the "experts" missed, and, plus, it gives them a resource they can point to to justify doing what they already wanted to do.

On some level, I don't even blame less-experienced developers for this. I wouldn't want to learn the whole of everything you need to know now in just a few years. There's so much and it's confusing trying to figure out how it all fits together if you're just handed it and you haven't watched it evolve.

But please keep in mind, you'll one day be 40, 50, 60. And you'll still be you, with all the flaws and strengths that implies.