Age is a proxy for wisdom. The longer you are on this earth, the more wisdom and experience you will acquire. That has value. But that's not to say that age alone should be a dealbreaker or barrier to success, as the author has proven.
I'm 32; I look back at me at 18, 19, 20, even 25 and laugh at how little I knew. I have learned so much since then, and continue to do so. The main problem with being young is that you don't realize what you've yet to realize.
Well, maybe. You get experience when things happen. The more you play it safe, the less happens. And you only get wisdom when you think about your experiences.
There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.
> The main problem with being young is that you don't realize what you've yet to realize.
Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.
I still haven't met any. I've met plenty of smart kids, and I'm pretty sure I was one, 15 years ago. However, I had no idea what I was doing, and worse yet, had the hubris to think I did.
I was insufferable, and I'd never hire 15-years-ago me. I also won't hire any other young engineers -- I'll let them find out how little they actually know on someone else's dime.
On the other hand, if I was in the VC game, I'd absolutely leverage young engineers as grist for my mill. They're the most amenable to the risk, and it doesn't really matter if the vast majority of small investments fail (and they will, especially given the inexperienced teams), if you hit just a few home run exits.
> Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.
That's unnecessarily defeatist. There are steady advances, but there's very little that's genuinely new under the sun, and quite a bit of what the youngsters get excited about is just the cyclic rediscovery of what we already knew.
Your loss, really. I've interviewed and worked with several young engineers who were really top-notch, who worked out great, and were mature in their approach to work and life in general. They also tend to come with a lower price tag. Some have not worked out so well, but I don't have any reason to believe that the failure rate changes dramatically with age.
As I myself get older, I'm not so sure that the maturity level changes all that much either. People are just better at hiding their flaws as they grow older, then you find out too late when there's an issue.
Despite their intelligence they've always required constant senior level supervision, and have generally been the ones most likely to create maintenance-heavy components due to inexperience.
I'm not sure why our experiences differ so substantially, but I'm happy to hire only senior engineers and let other companies pay to train the young ones. The senior engineers are more than worth the minimal financial premium.
Sounds like you have bad projects management and let people go cowboy and build bad things because you don't communicate with each other.
Getting good work out of junior engineers requires a management investment greater than the cost of simply hiring experienced engineers to begin with, and they still will not produce code to the same level of robustness and quality.
I can see from your company that you don't operate this way. I assume this choice expands the apparent pool of available applicants, but it also ensures that your company is likely completely uninteresting to senior, experienced, genuinely expert engineers.
In my experience, there are two kinds of engineering managers. The first is the kind that has figured out (or thinks they've figured out) how to get decent enough code out of inexperienced or just plain bad engineers. The second is the kind that realizes that they don't have to work nearly so hard or jump through so many procedural hoops if they just hire people that know what they're doing to begin with.
What's more, those experienced people tend to have extensive contacts and make it easy to hire their friends.
That said, I'm happy to let you spend the time, money, and energy training and managing junior engineers, while dealing with their subpar work output.
You certainly have an active imagination, so I'm sure the next things you make up would be just as interesting.
Flatline3, you're wrong in pretty much every particular about how I work and how my company works.
It's certainly possible to mentor younger developers well and at low organizational cost. It depends a lot on your process. In particular, I think pair programming, frequent commits, good unit tests, and collective code ownership together make it entirely safe to hire somebody younger, and you get substantial benefits.
I also think it's shortsighted to say, "Hey, let the shitty shops train junior developers." Great senior developers have to come from somewhere, and I think they'll never get great working at places that don't have their acts at least somewhat together. I benefited a lot from people taking a chance on me when I was younger, and I think I have a professional obligation to return the favor.
As for documentation, I'm not sure quite what to say. The best person to document code is the person that's writing it. The best person to document things that aren't code is a technical writer, not an engineer.
That said, I hate ageism. Always have. However, as I get older, I find it more annoying that 22 year olds think they are "old." I'm 35 and Know I'm not old so 13 years my junior as old is just silly. Certainly 22 year olds can be mature. Old... no.
No. Caused me to raise my eyebrows too.
Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.
Older people can be full of hubris too, using appeals to experience and authority arguments to shortcut rational thinking.
Using the I'm more experienced than you argument is the same as people saying you insist on C++ cause that is what your comfortable and experienced with, and you'll cost the company millions in lost productivity.
All other things being equal, I'll always pick the older engineer with more experience and maturity than the young engineer without.
Just as a nice case study...
I was "old" when SOAP got popular (late twenties early thirties). Most of my (age) peer group seemed to agree with me in that it seemed over complicated and messy. We were, of course, old stick-in-the-muds who couldn't adapt to the new technology :-)
It was the "young" developers who jumped on it more than anybody else that I saw - the everything-in-xml crowd.
Ten years on, of course, the "young" crowd are now seen as "old".
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose :-)
Ageism cuts both ways, and it's never an excuse for winning an argument or evaluating a person. You evaluate people on their merits or you pass over valuable people and pay the price for it.
Amen. Young and old both have stick-in-the-mud types. It's just that the young folk haven't had the time to demonstrate whether they are stick-in-the-mud types. You don't want to hire them whatever their age.
Using node.js (or whatever) doesn't make you cool, hip, and open to new ideas. I can guarantee that, if this forum is still around in ten years time, there will be somebody complaining about this old fker who wants to do everything in node.js :-)
In the same way (not industry-related) I've observed that people who are 50+ years are seen as "elderly". That was 60 or 65 some 15 years ago.
Yet, there seems to be quite a bit of this on here.
As far as I know, nothing ever happened because of that.
However, what we're talking about is experience. Those with little experience are not members of a protected class.
This happens _a lot_.
Woman are this, women are that, we don't want to hire women because they are XYZ. People don't say it as much explicitly anymore, but I see it in their attitudes.
Every woman is different, as is every 18 year old. We should not have pre-conceived notions about what they are like, we should have a hiring process that is a meritocracy where we will let anyone prove to us they have what it takes. Just because you haven't met a young person who would make a good engineer at your company doesn't mean they don't exist. Young people, like women, have often not been aware or been encouraged to seek opportunities in engineering.
In some ways, yes. But just mundane everyday life teaches you a lot -- the hundreds of coworkers you've interacted with, the stories you've swapped about dealing with projects and bosses and clients and customers, your romantic relationships, etc. You pick up on the patterns of failure and success and, above all, good judgment, that can't really be learned any other way.
> plenty of people with widsom well beyond their years
Things like raw coding/product talent, pure drive -- sure. You can have these at any age. But wisdom beyond one's years? I wish it were true, but I don't think it is.
Running a whole product team, dealing with employees, stakeholders, deciding what to invest resources in, etc. -- that's where maturity and experience really provide their value, so you don't make all the really costly novice mistakes. Intelligence is very helpful, but it isn't a substitute.
Yes. Those are some of the experiences I'm talking about. Take a safe job, don't date, don't interact much: you'll have a lot less raw material to turn into wisdom.
> But wisdom beyond one's years?
I have seen it. It's easiest to spot in people who've experienced early struggle or tragedy. It's not true for all of them (or even many of them), but they definitely have the raw material.
I ran all over the world with a backpack before I realized that everything is relative and my adventurous experiences weren't necessarily any more valuable than a friend's who stuck around and built a family (which I'm finally doing now myself too).
Yes, there are. But not in the sense you want to mean. There are plenty of kids who have lived through great hardship, who have had to learn survival and coping skills which one would only expect of someone much older. Pampered, middle class American white kids don't have that kind of wisdom, never will.
What you are referring is cocky people who take their limited experience as some greater truth when all they are really doing is revealing how little they know.
Wisdom comes from experience. Experience requires you both to have done things in your life and to have had the time to reflect on those events. That comes with age.
... and with having those experiences, and with having the ability to reflect and learn from them.
I agree with William. I know some folk in their twenties who have done more (and reflected on what they've done and learned from it) that some folk I know that are my age (40s).
Wisdom comes from having experiences and the ability to learn from them. While that's roughly correlated with age there are:
* plenty of older folk who don't have many experiences, or don't have a good ability to learn from them
* plenty of younger folk who push themselves - or get pushed - to have a bunch of experience and learn those lessons very well.
I know people in their 20s who are wiser than people I know in their 60s. And vice versa. Personally I vastly prefer to look at people first rather than make assumptions based on age.
Thanks, I know what I'm referring to. As I explained elsewhere in the thread (and before you posted), some of the people with wisdom beyond their years are indeed the people who had to learn coping skills early.
Also, wisdom definitely does not come with age. I have met unwise retirees because they assiduously did not think about their experiences.
True. But they, in my experience anyway, they still end up way wiser at 30 than they were at 20 :-)
Do you find your self progressing after each year, or every few years, and never taking a wrong turn? As an extreme example I can imagine someone having a bad drug problem in their 30s during which they're worse off in every way than in their 20s, and only come out of it in their 40s. I think for most people improvement and regression are more subtle and happen in many dimensions. Strict progress is illusory. I think it's too easy to get caught up in your present values and discount the wisdom of your younger self just because you care about your present self more than your past self.
It's also fairly obvious with older people that their minds just don't work like they did when they were in their 30s. Are they really wiser, do they really have more total knowledge than at their prime? What's the ratio of those who are and those who aren't? I also like to point out that a lot of important knowledge and wisdom can be found in books alone without experience. It's easy to forget this fact among all humans regardless of age: other people (including your past selves) may be privy to information you are not privy to.
But neither of those invalidate the original point -- that you can have age without wisdom, but not wisdom without age.
So, what mistakes am I and others here making? What made your perspective change, and why are you sure your current perspective is less wrong? I've given some reasons for why I believe what I believe, how about you?
That being said, there are lots of exciting things to do when you know not what you realize. Especially for certain types of overachievers and perfectionists, we are significantly more hampered by what we can do excellently vs what we can simply deliver passably.
Go enjoy life and collect those data points, success and failure. :)
I can relate to a lot of the points the article makes. When I was 14 I knew just as much as I know know in certain areas but I was never taken seriously because I was 'just a kid'.
On the flip side, it means an equally applied 25 year old will be just that much wiser than the 18 year old.
Young people are constantly told that they're young and inexperienced and don't know much about life, all of which is true. However, this has a huge negative effect on their self-confidence and sense of self-worth. I'm starting a company, and the words I fear most at a negotiation are "You're still young. What do you know about business?"[1] Not a lot of people say those words out loud, but most people at least hint at them. Those words hurt. If someone points out your shitty business practices or poor hacking skills as reasons to not do business with you, you can at least go back home and fix those problems. If someone says they're not going to do business with you because you're 22, then that's that. I don't know how prevalent this phenomenon is in Western countries, but I feel ageism is a huge thing in India.
You don't realize this unless you try to do things that people your age are not expected to do. Here's an anecdote: a friend -- let's call him P -- once interviewed for a senior-level position at a software company. P loves software and electronics and has deep practical knowledge about both. Not surprisingly, he did very well at the interview. According to the HR guys, he was exactly the kind of person they were looking for. So there he is post-interview, talking with one of the HR people about things he has built, when someone reading his resume notices his age for presumably the first time. Long story short, they swear at him for 15 minutes for wasting their time and tell him to GTFO of the building. All because he is 21 at the time.
This sort of stuff starts to get to you after a while, which is why posts like this one are useful. It's true that age is an indicator of wisdom, but as a young person you need not let that get to you. No matter what older people tell you, you need not let your age be a limiting factor in your success. That, I think, is the essence of this post.
PS: I'm not passing a moral judgement on society here. I don't mean to say that the Indian society should coddle young people. I'm just stating facts and sharing some of my feelings.
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[1] I deal with very small business in what is often called the "unorganized" sector. People in other industries may have different stories to tell.
However, I don't know how much that matters. I'm 24, and when I was 17-18, I was KILLING IT as a band manager and show promoter. I sold $80,000 worth of tickets in 3 years for my own bands, and for anyone that's wondering: getting shows at good venues is borderline impossible, getting people to pay to see them another miracle.
I've done things since that people may call "more significant" but they weren't. That was the hardest thing I've ever done and my most significant accomplishment. And I couldn't do it again if I started today.
This is very much in line with the whole "there's no speed limit to learning" and the commonly accepted fact that working in a startup will make you mature much faster than most other positions you might hold.
Further, the wisdom people gain with age includes what is not possible and what is foolish. History is filled with stories where being a little foolhardy has changed our world. This is why mentor relationships can be so valuable. I recommend everyone commit time to them, they often pay great dividends to both parties.
But let me put it in a simple analogy, hackernews readers itself amount to a very tiny minority of people worldwide. higher education, same story.
now does either one amount to wisdom or experience? imho, the answer is no. if you look at the world right now, it looks more like the average guy gets more stupid with each day passing.