[squozzer]

Now that I'm 49, here's my 2 yen.

After a certain age, I didn't care as much about the "challenge" of a new position so much as the money and power I would receive. Shocking, I know.

I also acquired a certain ruthlessness born maybe out of my observations of corporate life, or from a sense that my life's candle is burning ever shorter.

Sure, I would still make the mouth noises and refrain from keeping it real. And I would occasionally succeed.

The problem with revealing a taste for money and power is that it puts you in competition with the company suits - who consider money and power as much their birthright as their perfectly coiffed hair and their legacy admission to Hahvahd. So if given the choice, the suits will always choose less-experienced people who don't value money and power over better-qualified people who do.

Put another way, suits have a sense of inadequacy that only Freud could appreciate.