Let's look at the reason for the "stuck in your ways" dynamic. There is a saying in the software engineering world, which is "Those who do not learn from UNIX are destined to reinvent it badly." Very often times new approaches come to the fore as fads which then fade away just as quickly. Often times these new approaches have tradeoffs people make because they don't understand the value of the old approaches. Nothing shows this better than something like Ruby on Rails, a technology personally I will never touch more than I have to.

Older engineers who have been around the block tend to assume new technologies are fads until proven otherwise. Many have been burned a few times. Many have learned the hard way that the best engineers are methodologically conservative. And so they get labelled as stuck in their ways not because they are not creative, but rather because they are cautious about new fads. The way to sell to these engineers is to demonstrate understanding of the values of the old methods as well as the benefits of the new approaches.

All you can do is take an engineer, listen to their ideas and observe their work, and if they are good it will show. If they are past their sell by date, that will show too. And if they are more air than insight, well that comes out pretty quickly too.

I will entirely second this however.