RJ asks:
"I would like to get some advice from others that may be going through the same situation I am. I am currently 19 and will be turning 20 in 1 week. I have held my current job, as Systems-Network Administrator, for almost a year now in very good standing according to my direct boss, the IT Manager. I have 5 years industry experience and a few certifications, yet I am more then qualified for my current position according to previous employers (and my work history/experience). It has recently come to my attention that our IT Director is trying to either find a way to get rid of me or transfer me into a miserable job position, all because of my age. My Boss explained to me he thinks it has to do with a bit of jealousy. Everyone I work with is over the age of 30 and the IT director is in his mid 40's." Either your too old, or your too young, or it's racial issues, sexual preference, and sometimes it can even be religion. Despite the fact that it's the
21st century discrimination still exists and many of us have had to face it in our careers. For most, it basically amounts to a career roadblock, while for others, it can also turn into an extremely humiliating and terrible experience. What options exist for those who experience it in any of the many forms it can take in the workplace?
"The IT Director has never approached me about any of this and treats me fine to my face, but seems to talk bad about me around my Boss, though my boss does his best to defend me. I have had no work problems (documented or not) and have a clean HR record. It's to the point I can't trust anyone at work anymore. Everywhere I work people like me but as soon as they learn my age they automatically hate me, become jealous, or try to find ways to get rid of me. I have learned to deal with this problem as I figured it went with the territory.
However, I also have a new baby daughter and a new wife to support
and I can't lose my job, especially in this economy. Needless to say
I am polishing up the resume and starting to look for a new job, but can anyone offer any sound advice, or legal actions which I can take if I do get fired, or even suggest employers in the industry that are friendly to my age bracket?"
Slashdot Mirror
My feelings exactly. Your boss should be the one handling this, perhaps with Personnel.
If your boss won't support you, then try to get a letter of recommendation from him and work on getting another job. As the poster of the parent note implies, once a Director has a mind to do things, like canning someone, they usually find a way to do it.
Good luck in your next job (and there will always be a next job).
I went and scheduled a meeting with the manager, and then the second line manager (higher-up.) As a performance review.
I said I simply wanted to get some feedback on how they thought I was doing and how I could continue to meet their expectations.
I said I felt I was doing well at meeting my goals, but I wanted to make sure that I was doing all that I could, and wanted their opinions on my performance.
The first job I ever did this at, it was wonderful. I heard better things about myself than I could have guessed. This was at a small company.
The next time I did this, it was at a large multinational corporation. The manager brought my team leader into the meeting even though I hadn't wanted it. The team leader was a micromanager who changed my priorities daily, took away whatever I was working on and finished it himself, without giving feedback about what I was or wasn't doing, even when asked. So, he lit into a speech about how I managed to contribute no value to the team. (Despite other team members sending notes praising me to the manager. I was copied on those.)
I was given a chance to respond, and I fell for it- I showed clearly how every point was an unfair assessment. I won the battle, but lost the war. I've not been fired, but I do have weekly meetings with my manager now.
He gets good feedback via notes from my new team leader, and other members of the team. I tell him how I've met my deadlines, and what I'm working on next and when the deadline is for it. He nods and smiles and comes up with something esoteric to criticise, like, did I improve customer satisfaction this past week? To which I say, yes, I met my deadline and excelled at providing the customer with a better 'X'.
So, be careful, learn from my experiences. However, it does look good to be proactive and seek out ways- just be careful to not get ambushed as I did, and in doing so, don't get sucked into winning the battle...
This is so true - I hope you read it again before disagreeing with it...
Personally, I'm 44 with an engineering degree. 5 years ago, I began to transition from purely s/w dev (started professionally in 1982) to IT management. I now do very little development - Java stuff under Domino - and am responsible for several sites.
I personally LOVE younger guys and have tried unsuccessfully to put some into network management positions. In retrospect, the lack of success really was due to lack of maturity. I know that had I been onsite personally, I could have shielded them from interpersonal dealings with Users. But I couldn't be there. Our next folks will be a little older with at least the fortitude to get a BS and/or MSCE-type certifications.
Why? Because the job is more about managing and educating users (to make them Good Users) than about setting up networks, adding accounts, installing updates, etc.
Here's what I think is my Big Quote:
Until we see that our jobs are about relationships, not machines, we will always be perceived as immature.
And rightly so.
Mark
If you've approached your manager with the same pile of BS that you approached Slashdot:
"I'm 19 years old with 5 years industry experience"
You shouldn't be surprised that he's trying to get rid of you. That statement alone sort of underscores your ignorance. Incase you missed it, it implies that you've been working at a 6-to-5 job that actually _matters_ since the age of 14.
Warezing != "industry experience".
Upgrading AOL on your dad's computer != "industry experience".
Having a personal webpage != "industry experience".
Its like this, spudboy.."industry experience" means sleeping on the floor of your office overnight because you need to babysit half a dozen mission-critical AIX, Solaris and IRIX boxes following a complete power-failure and network outage, because if you dont, the entire department's workload might grind to a halt, and the company will lose $30,000 per minute until its fixed. Many people here have seen and dealt with that sort of thing. No offense, but I doubt you have seen anything similar during your "5 years of industry experience".
Here's another way to look at it --- I've been coding since about the age of 4. Yes, 4. And no, i'm not kidding. (Hell, my parents still have one of my "Apple ][ Operators License" picture IDs in a photo album from when I was in 2nd grade..) Now, do you think I would put "I'm 27 years old and have 23 years industry experience" on my resume'?
Nuff said.
Bowie J. Poag
You say your boss likes you, but your boss also tells you that the IT director wants to get rid of you? That's weird -- the IT director is going to get rid of a valuable employee over his immediate boss's objections? What could be causing that? Maybe your boss is not being completely honest with you (could it be that he wants to get rid of you and shift the blame to someone else so he can save himself some guilt when it comes time to fire you?). I'm not saying that's the case, since I don't know the circumstances, but I think you need to consider what may really be happening vs. what people are telling you.
You also say "everywhere I work...as soon as they learn my age they automatically hate me." That's really odd. I can understand some level of jealousy, and even one or two companies that are full of bozos who dislike young whippersnappers like you, but if you are finding this in a variety of different work environments then there may be something else going on. If you are really performing and able to work with people, most companies wouldn't care about your age. Since you are basically saying that your age is ALWAYS a problem, I think you have to ask whether your age -- or more precisely your attitude, level of maturity, or other things that come with your age -- REALLY IS a problem. (I don't say this to be cruel; I was also a precocious kid, was managing six people by age 23, etc; this is my perspective as a now-30-something who knows he made plenty of stupid mistakes in his youth.)
Two suggestions. First, start by making a really candid assessment of the situation, starting with your own behavior. What could you have been doing that would lose you points with your boss, your boss's boss, your coworkers, or other people in the company instead of winning points? Could it be that you make them feel dumb? (There's sometimes a fine line between helping people out and being an obnoxious know-it-all.) Could it be that you don't behave in a "professional" manner? Could you be really full of yourself? (There's a big difference between telling people your age and flaunting it.) Could it be that you actually made decisions, or advocate positions, that are bad for the company? (In my experience, this is a common one among young people who are very smart but lack business wisdom -- they may get all up in arms because they're convinced they have the Right Answer about some technical issue, but they fail to consider the larger business concerns.)
Second, take pre-emptive action. If you think you might get fired, you need to be ready with an alternative. Polish up your resume, get in touch with old contacts who might know where you could find a new position (referrals are always much better than answering random want ads or Monster postings), etc. But be careful not to neglect your responsibilities in the meantime -- you want to be a model employee. And DO NOT talk about this with anyone other than your immediate boss! Being a chatterbox will only reinforce any image of you as immature.
Personally I wouldn't suggest legal recourse, because I doubt you'll really get anywhere with it. There's not a whole lot of precedent I'm aware of (IANAL, of course) for "reverse" age discrimination, and furthermore, actually proving that's what led to your firing (should it come to that) might be really difficult. It certainly won't exactly be something you'll want to brag about to your next employer.
Good luck.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I'm 47 and have been working professionally since my mid-teens, over thirty years in other words.
... I was being paid for my work, my work was being bought and used world-wide within the PDP-8 community (which was a tiny one by today's standards, of course). And you're saying I wasn't a professional because I happened to be in High School at the time?
The fact that I was 16 didn't stop DEC from thanking my friends and I for what later because OS/8 Teco (text editor, and the "8" stands for PDP-8). Thanked us on the first page of the user manual, as a matter of fact, for the entire world to see.
Nor did it stop customers from buying other software my friends and I wrote.
Let's see
Bah.
Next thing you'll say is that I'm no longer working professionally because I manage an Open Source project.
As far as not being taken seriously due to age, it wasn't a serious problem back then. It was a smaller and less formal world of computers back in those days.
I vastly prefer my gigabyte Linux boxes that cost less than an 8192 12-bit word PDP-8 did in the late 60s, but I kinda miss the informality and "small-town" feeling of the industry that I entered over 30 years ago.
There have been numerous comments made about how it isn't correct to count 5 years of work experience between ages 14-19 as "5 years of industry experience". I don't disagree with this at all-- work done in high school, especially part time and for internships, is not equivalent to coming in every day for 8+ hours for 5 years, as an adult.
/so/ much smarter than everyone else my old fogey managers don't listen to me!" kind of thing. I've had the good fortune to work for and around some stunningly bright people (enough to know when I'm sometimes outgunned), and in some ways have learned more about what I /don't/ know that what I do. But I have worked hard and made a real effort to build up experience that will make me an attractive candidate for employment when I graduate next term. Many of my classmates don't have as much work experience as I do any way you look at it, and in this tight economy I obviously want to get that across, as well as the general notion that while I'm not exactly a seasoned professional, I have a reasonable understanding of my strengths and weaknesses in the workplace, at least enough not to make a complete ass of myself politically (and technically).
So, bearing that in mind, how are we supposed to talk about experience? I'm 20 and got my first job at 15, doing data entry and document layout for a startup, and had done some volunteer tech support for my high school before then. Since then I've done various (corporate and academic) sysadmin and programming work, and some work as a data analyst. I think all of this counts in some way as experience in the field-- even if it isn't equivalent to an adult's experience, neither am I talking about mowing lawns, flipping burgers, or fixing my grandparents' PC. This was real work for real companies, with problem solving, customer interaction, and exposure to office politics.
So far, when people ask me how many years of experience I have, I tend to say that "I've been working in IT since I was 15" (demonstrably true), rather than "I have 5 years of experience" (shaky ground). My resume makes it clear that much of this work was part time while attending school. Is that acceptable?
Please understand that I'm not trying to pull a "But, but, I'm 20 years old and even though I'm
I find it offensive when people discount my experience as worthless out of hand, probably like someone with 30 years in the industry gets annoyed when a 25 year old tries to play games of one-upmanship.
How can I talk about what I view as valuable time and experience in the workplace without coming off as a cocky know-it-all?
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
The excuse being used is that the people who occassionally see their kids aren't working the same number of hours as we 24-year old single folks. This is being enforced by our VP, who has two kids but typically spends 80+ hours at work a week (no problem with priotiries there, eh?).
Hell, just last week the person in the cube next to me got a talking-to because she "left early" (went to see her son's orchestra concert -- at 7 PM). My veep told 'er if she does it again she'll be "in a bad position for future layoffs".
Of course, if you read my past comments about my company, this shouldn't be too shocking. I can't wait for the economy to recover so I can escape that shithole.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
So...how do they know you're 19? It's not like it's really any of their business. What would they really do if you told them you were, say, 22? Call your mother for verification? There is no law that says that you have to give them your real age (or name, or whatever). It isn't a government job is it? (in which case there *may* be laws). It's really none of their damn business how old you are and AFAIK you are not obligated give this sort of information.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
a) You're not as good as you think you are (who says your previous employers were worth a damn?)
...
b) At your age, you don't realize that many of the things you think are "stupid reasons" aren't.
c) You could just be an immature brat that they hate working with.
Nothing personal, and I'm not over 30 - but everything isn't some conspiracy based on discrimination. I've worked with enough dipshits of ALL ages