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by pc86 2038 days ago
> He or she is senior and respected because experience is valued.

Medicine is not the field we should be modeling our value of experience on. If you've been there 1 year longer, your opinion is more valued. Not because you're more knowledgeable, but because you happened to have graduated residency one year sooner. Medicine is about as far away from meritocracy as you can get while still somewhat feigning support for it.

Should we be trusting the experienced folks that say mainframes are fine and editing the DOM directly with jQuery is good enough? I mean zipping up binaries and dropping them on a share is just as good as GitHub, right?

Ageism is an excuse for being uncompromising and unwilling to accept that someone younger than you might have a good idea or know something you don't.

1 comments

Should we be trusting the experienced folks that say mainframes are fine and editing the DOM directly with jQuery is good enough? I mean zipping up binaries and dropping them on a share is just as good as GitHub, right?

Do you think that older doctors insist on using obsolete surgical techniques or less effective medications? Or older lawyers reference laws that have already been repealed?

Ageism is an excuse for being uncompromising and unwilling to accept that someone younger than you might have a good idea or know something you don't.

They might do, sure. But you’ll hit ageism eventually and see younger people reinventing a wheel that you too reinvented.

Obsolete? Probably not. Indicated in outdated literature but contraindicated in current literature? Absolutely. I am old enough to have experienced it, and haven't. I'm also not against doing things differently than I did in the past. I've worked with 30 year olds who were completely unwilling to compromise, and folks in their 60s who were. I don't know anyone who would rather work with the former over the later because of age.