[eitally]

I find it amusing when I hear people make statements assessing short durations like 6 years to be significant. Six years in many industries is enough to reach mid-tier level expertise, but it is absolutely not mastery level. I'm making this comment from the perspective of someone who cultivate an engineering management role in high-tech manufacturing over the course of 15 years (where I was reporting direct to C-level when I left, with a team of close to 150 around the world) before joining a FAANG, where I had the rug pulled out from under me (new leadership killed my team in the first six months and I had to find a new role or be on the street, and the new role was unlike anything I'd ever done before). I spent 8 years starting a new career before being summarily dumped in the RIFs of this winter/spring, and have subsequently begun a third career at a different company.

The experience builds, and my experience is that the sweet spot is frequently hiring people in their 40s who have ~20 years of practical experience in the domain or a related area, and who know how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls fresher employees might encounter while also creating a lot of shortcuts by virtue of their experience & networks. It was interesting: over the course of my career, the teams I was managing had ever-increasing average ages, ranging from mid-20s when I was leading my first team of developers to late-40s over the last few years in big tech. Different functions (business vs technical), but while I appreciate the enthusiasm so many new grads demonstrate, the self-sufficiency + competency of mid-career folks is worth its weight in gold.