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Does Age Really Matter?
ageless asks: "At my current job, age seems to be a major factor when it comes to listening to what I have to say and believing that what I say is true. I've done so many different things, like filling bosses' requests to build an online app that does something complex in a short time, building and maintaining servers and security, and act as a consultant for authentication code and security on various platforms. Yet, none of them respect me because I'm still in school and because I'm young. It's very frustrating. Does anyone else see this as a problem? Does anyone else have this problem?" I think it all should boil down to experience, however many people mistakenly believe that experience is proportional to age. This belief is faulty, however, when you consider that tomorrow's computer professionals start gaining experience in their teens, not in their twenties or thirties.
When you become seen as "too expensive" or "raising the groups health plan costs" or are married with kids and can't work 80 hours/week anymore. Then you get fired. Discriminiation works both ways.
This kind of respect doesn't come for free. We both had to claw our way up from the bottom of the heap, but it's certainly possible, when in the presence of intelligent and non-biased management to be evaluated based on your actual capabilities.
However, there is value in experience. Being so young, I still tend to de-value age and longevity, but I have noticed it makes a difference sometimes. Even though age doesn't seem to have much of a bearing on one's programming abilities, the longer you've worked in the industry, the less naive you become, and the better you can predict the future, which is key in the business world.
When you're fresh from school, you tend to think that you can do huge amounts of work in a short time. Just because you can code 1000 lines of code a day, doesn't mean that a 10,000 line project will take 2 weeks (or even 2 months!) It's a sad but true fact that working in a business environment, and shipping product requires all sorts of nasty things like QA, documentation, maintainence, etc.. I used to look at statistics of the average engineer writing 10-20 lines of code a day as a sign that the world was populated by idiots. Now that I manage a group of engineers, I see exactly why that number is (roughly) correct. Coding really is the very last step in a 100-step process.
Now, that having been said, I've also been in an environment where my manager was so biased towards age that I never got any respect, even though I was contributing much more than my elders on the team. I left that company (Oracle) for this startup for that very reason.
In general, it comes down to who your manager is. Some people are open-minded about age, some people aren't. If you are such a hot-shot, go get another job (preferably for a small company) and find a manager who will trust you.
fairly new at the job and all hot and ready to go.
The HEIC (head engineer in charge) told me to run the test program with a specific command line format. I was 2nd shift, and a little later, when he was gone, I decided that it would be more efficient if I used a different syntax that could be entered more quickly.
My output went up and I felt 'oh-so-proud' of my ingenuity.
Until the HEIC asked me where his debug files had gone the next day. The program was setup to generate the files when the command was entered the way he had specified. The customer wanted those files, and now he had to explain that they were not created.
Was the program set up stupidly? Yes. Should the HEIC have informed me of why I needed to run the program in such a specific way? Maybe. It doesn't matter, though. It was my fault. I was told to do a job in a certain way, but being young and brash, I KNEW more than the old futz.
It's not until you get older that you realize how much you don't know. You spend a lot of time feeling regretful about all the 'smart' moves you made while younger.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I find this to be somewhat true. I think the biggest thing is the maturity level and HOW you bring up ideas/changes. If you document everything clearly and lay it all out you'll get a good response. Being younger I think you have to do more work then somebody older but I think that's because they come accross as having more experience.
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Free Mac Mini
Yeah, I've got the same problem. What's worse is I'm a girl, so regardless of my age, it's still been difficult to gain respect from my colleagues. I've only recently graduated so it's hard to be taken seriously, but I am slowly gaining respect. If your acheivements haven't showed them anything, maybe it's time to find a new job? Good luck buddy... ~star
Hehe. I'm 19 years old and am the head/only IT guy in the firm. I've been given a great amount of respect, in fact 3 weeks or so after I started work, I got a building keycard and keys to all the doors in our office. My boss respects my opinion and skill, and in fact enjoys the fact that someone around here knows more than he does so he can work on running the business instead of dealing with picky technical details.
I think it comes down to just being confident and proving you know what your doing with every action. From the moment I came in here, I told him plainly what I did and didn't know how to do and told him I was more than willing to learn the stuff I didn't know. I've made myself useful to the point where my company couldn't easily rid themselves of me. I've become a valuable asset.
I send you this message in order to have your advice.
It's been this way for a long time, and probably will continue to be this way in the future. No one likes to have someone younger than you show they're more knowledgable than you. You've spent a time in the work place and should know more about solving problems than some young kid. It won't matter what the ages involved are. It's the way society is. Best you can hope for is someone who isn't so egocentric. Khyron
It seems to me that this boils down to how old your boss is. If the people that are in charge are young (under 30), it seems that even teeneagers get the respect they deserve. I've work with ancient bosses and younger ones, and I've definatly gotten more respect from the younger ones.
Anyone who has gone from collge onto a job knows that in your first year at a good job you learn 10x what you did in college. We have interns in our office who range from age 16 through 23. It's amazing to see the differnt levels in professional maturity, as well as know-how that come with age. Age discrimination sucks. I absolutely hate to be ignored, especially when I know I'm right, but it comes with the territory.
If you want to escape it, find a company where the average age is as close to your own as possible.
tcd004 The Pentium 4 Revealed!
You can get the first kind of experience by working really hard. But to have first hand experience of how a software system you built evolves over ten years in the real world, you have to be there for ten years.
There are other kinds of experience that are difficult to accomplish simply through effort alone. The long-term coming and going of corporate strategies, new languages, platforms, etc. is hard to understand even if you were to become a computer historian.
Sometimes that kind of long-term experience doesn't help, sometimes it even gets in the way, and sometimes, it's vitally important. I suspect that when people don't listen to you, it's in areas where they consider that kind of experience important.
Remember, there's Age (a chronological measurement), there's Experience (a measure of time spent at at task), and there's Life (no proper metric exists).
Experience is sometimes more than "I've set up sendmail a jillion times!" Sometimes, it's more like "Our CFO hates sendmail. Rather than argue with him over the nits, I'll just install qmail."
Life is a great teacher, and life experience is very valuable. I've seen enough hot-shot teenagers who think they know everything turn into twenty-ish people who suddenly realize how little they know.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
When you're older, you'll understand why.
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Some things to remember when you think that you're being unfairly shot down:
- You do not get to decide what is an adequate use of your time. That's what your boss is for. Are you acutely aware of the fact that the client has already given the boss a budget, and that when you say it'll take you an extra week, that puts extra $$ into the budget that might not be there?
- Rarely does your time NOT affect other people, so consider what dependencies you are creating. If it'll take you an extra week to do it "the right way", can the people who are waiting for your code before starting theirs wait that long?
- Who needs to be trained in order for your solution to work? CAN those people be trained? I don't use JSP at work because I don't expect to train my HTML people in that syntax.
- Not everybody needs to know everything. When you're showing a demo to the boss's boss, do NOT say stuff like "This came out lousy, we could do it better if we had more [time,money]."
One of my favorite pieces of advice for headstrong young engineers who don't understand why sometimes the answer is "no". Imagine you have a brick, and you tie a piece of string to that brick. You want to get the brick moved a few feet to the left. If you yank on the string real hard, the brick won't move, and the string will break. But if you exert a smaller, but constant, force on the string, then the brick will move. Sure you won't get it there fast, but you'll get it there.www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I'll bet that every one of the people who fails to take you or your opinions as seriously as you feel they should knows exactly how it feels because they went through exactly the same thing when they were your age. In fact, that's why some of them do it to you now; it's a rite of passage sort of thing, and they feel that if they had to go through it then you should too. Builds character, or something. I'm not saying that's right, but when you get right down to it that's what motivates a lot of their behavior.
I can also think of a few other reasons you might get these sorts of reactions. One is that here may be some issue with how you present your opinions. Like it or not, it is your responsibility to understand your audience and convey your views in a way that is convincing to them. In this sense it's not so much an age thing as a culture thing; an older person from "outside the culture" who didn't present things "the right way" would get the same reaction. Consider what happens when a sales guy or an exec walks into a room full of engineers.
Lastly, we come up against the fact that older people do have some advantages over younger ones. For example:
Despite all that, there's a lot to be said for fresh perspectives and youthful enthusiasm. Your ideas may seem flighty or unreasonable to some, but a wise man once said that because reasonable men don't try to change the world all progress depends on unreasonable men. My point here is that you can't expect them to subscribe to your idea of "merit" without some justification. Just as they have ways of doing technical things and won't change those without good reason, they have ways of doing social things and won't change those without good reason. Show them the reasons. Anticipate their objections, address their concerns, and show them in terms they will accept how things would work better if they were more accepting of ideas from "people like you".
BTW, I'm 35. I get flak from both the youngsters and the oldsters. It's like "no man's land" in the battle between generations.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
How exactly do you know it's because you are young? Garnering respect from your peers can be as much about how you conduct yourself as what you can do. Is it at all possible that you're just an arrogant jerk? Or on the flipside, that your demeanor doesn't show much self-confidence?
Anyhow, regardless of age, who at one point or another doesn't feel they are getting enough respect from the boss/co-workers/guy at Starbucks, etc.?
I don't know so much if its age or the communication styles that older people--relative term here--use. Young people, especially teens, tend to be agressive and absolutist in communication style. When you communicate this way with your peers in age its just the way you talk, but at least on subconscious level, most older folks tend to think you're just being young and reckless. The communication stlyes used by older, read established professionals in say their late thirties, is quieter and more inclusive. Arrgh... I hate these vague terms, but its like I know it when I hear it. Anyway, before you even communicate, take a look at what you want to say and try to find a way to say that comes off as humble and less cocky. Demonstrate in your arguement that you've thought through all the points, and avoid stating that you know what's best or 'what's best period'. Instead show the merits of your idea and consequences of the rivals. And, avoid challenging a person. I used to do this alot at work and it gained me something of a bad rep. Instead, come at the position in a way that gives ther person credit while pointing out problems with their position. Its a tough skill to learn, but it can save your butt as a young professional, and will allow you to forge alliances within your organization.
And that's another point: Young techies often have superb technical skills, superior skills at that, but seldom have little in they way of social skills. I cannot emphasize to everyone here that people skills are critical to your success as a professional. You may be right, or you have an inovative idea that will save the world, but it doesn't mean jack unless you can convince other people of that. And, having convinced other people of that, you still need allies who believe in you as a person to help move the idea along. A lot of geeks like to pretend that people skills don't matter and that its all technical prowess and experience. Hate to burst your bubble, but people have not changed all that much in the last fifty odd years that computers have been changing the world, and you still have to know how to deal with them.
Yep, seems he needs a few more years...
The bottom line is that age and experience do count. I could have been building Linux kernels from .1, but if it's my first day in a real job setting, then I should shut up and listen to what is going on around me. Business experience counts. Time on "real-world" projects counts. Overall years of experience in an industry count.
When I started my job, I quickly realized that I had a better handle on C++ than the others around me. Most were veterans, with 30+ years of assembler and Fortran under their belts. When I had to start learning Fortran and assembler from 30 year old machines, I began to wonder what it would look like in my language of choice. I could see much room for improvement in data structures, in code maintance, in comment style.
But I kept my mouth closed. I learned from my co-workers, I studied the code, I got to know machines that should be in a museum. When it got too much, I coded at home, using templates and exceptions to my heart's content.
I've been at it for two years, and I'm starting to get the respect. I can be trusted with a major project. I know the language, and how it's used. When I argue technology, I'm arguing at their level, not at the "gee-whiz, this stuff is so out-of-date" level. I don't call security holes "obvious". In other words, I don't insult those with more experience than me.
Go watch some Kung-Fu movies. They often have the young, brash fighter with natural talent, getting his ass kicked by an older man (or woman - go see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon already!!!). Humility is a good lesson to learn, and if you can't be humble, at least fake it. If you are good, they will eventually accept you, and you will get respect.
Once you get respect, you just need to keep on your toes, so some young thug doesn't come along and get you...
Until then, growing facial hair makes you look a lot older.
I have worked in places where I thought I was being dismissed merely because of my age. And some of those times I probably was. But looking back, I can see that some of those times I definitely wasn't.
This is clearest now that I'm older (I'm 27). A coworker's teenager or just-out-of-school applicant will come out and say something so totally ridiculous that I almost can't help but laugh. From their expressions it's clear they think I'm dismissing them "just because they are young". But the reality is that they really don't understand and that real understanding will only come with time.
It may be that you are a coding (or admin-ing, or whatever) god. That doesn't mean you understand The Issues: user psychology, social norms, political balances, etc. Here's a perfect example:
From time to time, an email virus erupts on the Internet. Post after post says "if only everybody would turn off feature X". These people have an "immature understanding". It's just a simple fact that you can't get "everybody" to do ANYTHING. You can explain this to an immature (of whatever age, but often pre-20's) person but they will just stare at you blankly and then go on to explain why it would work "if only" everyone would...
If literally no one will listen to you, you should at least consider the possibility that it's because what you are saying isn't worth listening to. If, upon sincere and mature reflection, you still think your idea has merit, ask someone why they are rejecting it. And don't dismiss their answer just because they are old.
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
In the meantime, pipe down junior and get me a frickin' coffee.
omega_rob
Even in the dotcom world, age does matter.
/.'ers are myopic, they think computer skills are all that matters, when in the real world, people skills, marketing skills, finance skills and networking (not LAN, people to people) skills are just as important, if not more. With just a little reflection, I can list tens of companies that have advanced, technically wonderful ideas that have failed or are failing, ie. Amiga, FreeBSD and even Apple, while companies that have less trendy technologies, but better marketing, are still beating the world, ie. Microsoft.
I think Salon just ran a piece where they were saying that 30 year old CEO's were out, and VC's are looking for a CEO's with grey hair. Perhaps it was reading business2.com on the exercycle that I read this, whatever.
Too many programmers and
So, even if your clueless, gray haired manager may not know Perl or PHP, they've been competing in the junglel of business for decades longer than you have, and no a few survival tricks that you don't. Learn from them, respect them and eventually replace them, but if you try to replace them too early, well, look up something called the Children's Crusade, or look up the history of NeXT.