Has little to do with age, but more with the amount of people in the CS field right now. Only a fraction of them are enthusiasts. I notice that especially with my "front-end" developer colleagues - of whom 3/4th is here to do a job and at home many of them don't even have their own computer. Sure they play video games on their XBox or PS4, but that's the extent of their technical interest. For them it's simply a well-paid 9-to-5 job.
Now my other colleagues are mostly doing back-end and embedded C++/Python stuff, and are in general a lot more interested in the technical side. I think it's more or less the other way around, 1 out of 4 is not really tinkering with tech at home - but even they are more interested in tech outside of their field. I show them stuff like docker, kubernetes, time-series databases and metrics collection stuff, ansible/tower and what we can do with those things, and how they could make changes in the way they design their software to make things more reliable or easier to deploy/monitor - and their reaction is "oh cool!". Our front-end team? Completely the opposite attitude and completely averse to changing the way they work. I hear "we'll do this manually" or "why? this works too"...
Most of the front-end dev roles seem to attract people who're not really into tech, but can code a bit. I think because of the immediate visual feedback? They end up hiding behind their frameworks with a lack of even basic understanding of HTTP or networking. Me as an embedded developer rolled into sysadmin role then has to tell them what the hell HTTP2 is, catch their screw-ups when they serve mixed http/https content on their site, ... Now they're not all like that, there are some pretty good guys there - but the majority can write basic code, and that's where it ends. Sadly it's no surprise their team-leads all fall in the wrong category. On the other side, I have the last say when stuff is deployed in production, so they are forced to adapt to certain things - but they'll always complain.
Now my other colleagues are mostly doing back-end and embedded C++/Python stuff, and are in general a lot more interested in the technical side. I think it's more or less the other way around, 1 out of 4 is not really tinkering with tech at home - but even they are more interested in tech outside of their field. I show them stuff like docker, kubernetes, time-series databases and metrics collection stuff, ansible/tower and what we can do with those things, and how they could make changes in the way they design their software to make things more reliable or easier to deploy/monitor - and their reaction is "oh cool!". Our front-end team? Completely the opposite attitude and completely averse to changing the way they work. I hear "we'll do this manually" or "why? this works too"...
Most of the front-end dev roles seem to attract people who're not really into tech, but can code a bit. I think because of the immediate visual feedback? They end up hiding behind their frameworks with a lack of even basic understanding of HTTP or networking. Me as an embedded developer rolled into sysadmin role then has to tell them what the hell HTTP2 is, catch their screw-ups when they serve mixed http/https content on their site, ... Now they're not all like that, there are some pretty good guys there - but the majority can write basic code, and that's where it ends. Sadly it's no surprise their team-leads all fall in the wrong category. On the other side, I have the last say when stuff is deployed in production, so they are forced to adapt to certain things - but they'll always complain.