| > I agree with OP's point on the inherant age discrimination within technology, I say this because I was once a biased younger human who didn't have the life experience to understand the other side. Thanks. Most people never stop to engage in a little introspection and think, you see a lot of that in comments. Perhaps I was fortunate enough in life to have come up through a different path. At 19 I went to work as an engineer at a place where everyone was 10 to 15 years older than me. I was still in school, it was just a work title, but I was treated as a full engineer. Unlike some of the tech companies I have worked for as an older person, the ratio of young-to-older where I worked at 19 was seriously skewed towards older experienced engineers. In fact, I was the only sub-30 year old in the team. My attitude was humble and simple: I want to learn from everyone who is willing to teach me. And teach they did. This was my start into becoming multidisciplinary. For example, one of the mechanical engineers ran the machine shop. He'd rope me in to help make parts on the manual Bridgeport and, eventually, design them and make them on the CNC machines. It was like that with just about everything that went on in the place. One day I could be designing analog circuits at me desk and the next on the roof helping fix a 20 ton air conditioning unit. I loved it. One day the VP of Engineering called me into his office. He sketched out a full system on a piece of paper. Just basic I/O and some notes on important functionality. He said: This is your project now. I need you to design and build every single one of these boxes. I said: "But, I don't know enough to do this, it's fairly advanced stuff". He said: "I know you can do it. You can learn what you don't know. And the guys will help you with anything you need. Can you do it?" I said "yes". It took a year and a great deal of effort, but I got it done. That was incredibly valuable and I often look back at that moment as a seminal event in my life. Anyhow, a long way to say that the obvious existence of age bias in technology is likely creating problems we don't yet understand. I can't predict what this means. All I know is that young engineers just out of university just don't know enough. It would be of great value to them to enter the workforce under the wing of older, more experienced engineers rather than having contempt for them. I have personally experienced the ugliness of what this lack of humanity can produce. I was having a conversation with an engineer in the team I was supporting in the course of one of my consulting engagements. His design of a subassembly intended to go into a spacecraft was flawed. It didn't take me long to realize this because, well, I have a lot of experience. I brought this up during a cordial one-on-one conversation. The response was, almost verbatim: "I have a Masters degree from MIT. I know what I am doing". Six months and a quarter of a million dollars later, the entire assembly disintegrates on the vibration table, precisely as I predicted. What's sad is that, even after that, he remained defiant and refused to listen to me. At some point I just gave up. I saw too much of that from others. I did whatever I could to help but was not about to take on a cultural problem I had no way to address. Mentorship is important, yet it requires the student to be receptive and humble. |
This is a key point (not only in engineering). In fact, I think it defines whether someone will excel at a faster rate than others with similar years of experience. Most of the time it is better to observe and listen in these circumstances and then decide if the advice makes sense with independent thought. Arguing or resisting while a mentor is discussing with you creates friction that can reduce the benefits of the mentoring relationship.