[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.