1) you're assuming every one is on Gradle 6 or higher lol. I can assure you that is not true.
2) Sure, pushing and making the decision are not the same thing. I can complain and persuade as much as possible and it doesn't mean it's going to happen.
3) I agree that you want people who care about improving software. Upgrading language versions isn't always the best route to do that though.
4) I don't think everyone on the team is reading about the latest updates in the world of Java. I think a pretty small portion of engineers are keeping 100% up to date, following Twitter accounts for Java dev, watching YouTube videos on it, etc. All that is educational and that's great to know but for most people, it's not going to help them work better because they know about features they can't use.
5) definitely sounds aggressive but okay. I haven't found a company yet who's complained about working in Java 8 versus 11/17. If a company is hiring for a role that uses Java, they're likely not limiting their candidates to those who've used their version of Java. It's a pretty standard language and if you know any other object oriented language, you'll be fine.
2) Sure, pushing and making the decision are not the same thing. I can complain and persuade as much as possible and it doesn't mean it's going to happen.
3) I agree that you want people who care about improving software. Upgrading language versions isn't always the best route to do that though.
4) I don't think everyone on the team is reading about the latest updates in the world of Java. I think a pretty small portion of engineers are keeping 100% up to date, following Twitter accounts for Java dev, watching YouTube videos on it, etc. All that is educational and that's great to know but for most people, it's not going to help them work better because they know about features they can't use.
5) definitely sounds aggressive but okay. I haven't found a company yet who's complained about working in Java 8 versus 11/17. If a company is hiring for a role that uses Java, they're likely not limiting their candidates to those who've used their version of Java. It's a pretty standard language and if you know any other object oriented language, you'll be fine.