Reply to post: Re: Unfortunately...

Re: Unfortunately...

Assuming that young people cannot be as capable as older people is also pretty arrogant. Young people can't help being young...they can only live one day at a time like anyone else...but they can learn quickly from oldies willing to share knowledge, experience and the benefit of a life long career and become better than the old people before they are old people themselves.

It is possible to condense 20 years of knowledge and experience into a few months of training...that's what education is. There is no need for a young person to have to spend 20 years, to get the same 20 years of knowledge and experience you have...because in 20 years, you've not only learnt what you need to know, you've also learnt what wasn't worth learning. In passing this knowledge down, you save the youngster wasting 20 years following the same fucking path, and they can find another path, with it's own pitfalls and new things to discover...which he can then pass down to produce an even better youngster...and so on, and so on.

As an oldie, you're only as good as the last youngster you trained...after all, somebody trained you...you weren't born a technical savant...in fact when you were born, tech didn't even resemble what we have today, you have, like all of us, been constantly learning throughout your career...lots of mini "start again" moments...which probably means young people aren't as far behind us as people like you like to think...in fact, they also don't carry the same baggage either. I spent 5 years in the 90s working as a Visual Basic programmer...yes, I got 5 years of programming experience...but nearly everything I know about VB is functionally worthless now. It helps me pick up new languages a little quicker than I otherwise would...but, other than that...it has no tangible value...especially since, I now no longer work with any of the technologies that I worked with back then. Hell, I'm not working with technology that I worked with even 10 years ago. Experience doesn't carry anywhere near as much weight in our industry as it would in other industries...simply because things change so radically and so frequently.

A lot of old people hold on to knowledge like it is some sort of arcane wisdom...when in fact, it's not arcane...it's just not documented.

There is an oldie I occasionally work with, even older than I am, that has weird licensing contracts for software he builds. Essentially, everything he builds has to be housed on platforms that he, and only he, controls...one day, the mask slipped and he got in a mess, he needed help...so he let me in to help him with a problem...turns out, his code is fucking crap and his main motivation for hiding his codebase away is to prevent anyone scrutinising his code and stepping in to take it over...so after some coaxing, he let me send a youngster around (that I trained, he is 22) who tidied up the codebase, made it a lot more efficient, much easier to deploy...and it is now documented...also, because more than one person now understands the setup, he can take a day off every now and then and not worry about anything. I paid the youngster 70% and I took 30%...because that is fair...camping on a £100k job and preventing young people being hired is not fair and will ultimately result in what we see here at Kyndryl...oldies being laid off.

Young people can't know what we know unless we share it with them and when we do share, they can be just as good or better

If you're in the camp that thinks experience trumps youth simply because youth has no experience and that is one of the main things keeping you in work...then you sir are a fucking jobsworth like the bloke above was. When you finally retire, there will be nobody to replace you and everything you've created will be worthless...it will be scrapped, and somebody will come in and start all over again...if you train young people, bring them into the fold and teach them how to carry on when you're long gone...your influence, knowledge and experience can far outlive you and continue to be useful and continue to provide wealth for others...otherwise, you're just another dead pleb that simply did a job for 30 years.

If the work you do is truly unique and cannot be fathomed by literally anyone else, then congratulations, you are one of mankind's rare super-geniuses...a true one of a kind...I'm sure monuments will be built in your honour and your name will carry into legend for generations. People will be talking about you around campfires for centuries.