[ajarmst]

An aphorism I occasionally use (I can be tedious): "the only way to make a twenty-year old comfortable leading a meeting is to wait until they're a thirty-year old." Doesn't stop us from forcing the poor bastards to do public-speaking assignments or dropping them into "teams" of completely inexperienced people they've never met with no leaders in the name of ephemeral "soft-skills."

[Smaug123]

I am only 26, and I know I'm not good at management, but I don't think that's really true. During secondary school, I took part in Model United Nations conferences, and after the first two or three, I was magically completely happy standing up in front of a large audience of peers being asked awkward questions. There are a bunch of required skills that you can simply train (e.g. with Toastmasters), even if you can't hit the entire spectrum of management skill this way.

[ajarmst]

That's a fair point, but note that you're describing the sort of experience that is real, and therefore valuable. Model United Nations is one thing, 'give a two minute speech on a topic of your choice, and we're going to grade your slide deck' is another. Extra-curricular things like toastmasters and Model UN and things like apprenticeships, internships and co-op are ways of acquiring more real experience earlier, not a replacement for real experience. Sadly, programs that provide that sort of experience are among the first casualties of budget or other pressures.

[jl2718]

I was active in Model UN many years ago, and I really just didn’t get Toastmasters. It felt like talking about nothing for no reason to people that don’t care. It’s unfortunate that meaningful formal debate seems to stop in adulthood. There certainly are plenty of things to disagree about.

[thimkerbell]

There should be a topic-specific analogue of Toastmasters and it shouldn't urge you to exude false confidence.

[aiisjustanif]

This is such a self-fulfilling prophecy it hurts. Especially having been in leadership programs with other engineers in my early 20’s and go on to see them have some of the best soft skills in my later years. After 3 Fortune 100 companies, I have met a magnitude more of software engineers and infrastructure engineers over 40 that refuse to speak up and refuse lead because they see same thing over and over again, new older leadership comes in tries to change things a bit, they just keep developing software, and question why does it matter to lead or communicate.

I currently work on a team of 10 engineers and 2 of them over 50, asked me what was GraphQL, when I did a public demo on GraphQL APIs around it. We are in a department that runs an e-commerce product with 30mil+ monthly visitors. How does a 25, 26, 27, year old automatically mean bad at public speaking...? Personally, my best manager has be 28 years old.

[ajarmst]

The numbers are arbitrary. My primary point is that many important skills cannot be learned without the requisite experience. Individual experiences, talents and interests vary. Perhaps adjust my crude analogy to note that your very good manager at 28 would probably agree that she wasn't very good at it when she first left school or for the first few years of her career, and that her skill at working with other people was learned primarily from working with other people, not self-study, instruction, or other process that allowed for much compression of the time it takes. Those who excel early usually have done so because they started earlier and sought more opportunities for the necessary experience. I suspect if you broke it down to hours, you'd find a similar number, just applied at a rate of 20 hours a week instead of 10.

[ajarmst]

I should add that there is one other way to make that twenty-year-old comfortable: have them be a sociopath. But our problem of distinguishing between sociopathy and confident leadership is a much, much longer conversation.