arguing with people that thought they knew more than I did about a field I’ve worked in for 20+ years.
LOL. Yea, I work in IT and have to listen to boomers tell me about their 30 years of IT experience and why I’m wrong.
They mistake 30 year old experience that is no longer relevant with practical experience that is relevant today. It’s a subtle but important difference. In my experience, the people who have to prove themselves by telling you about how much experience they have are the least competent.
Results will dictate how competent you are. Not how much experience you claim to have.
Experience is worth a lot. Even idiots with a lot of experience can be very good at something. Smarter people need less experience to be good at something - but they still need it. As for changing technology - IT changes but the principles remain the same. Plus there’s a lot of soft skills that never change. Being able to talk to people, manage expectations, guide clients in the right directions, etc… That’s worth a lot more in the long term than being up to date with every new tool or framework.
My manager’s manager and I were having a heated debate about why we need documentation in the company (it was a major reason for delays in my team) and he pulled this BS on me: “I’ve been doing this job for 10 years, documentation goes stale.”
Yeah and so does bread. Should that mean we should never bake bread? (obviously a joke, but really, so fucking what if it goes stale and we have to spend an hour a week keeping it up to date? Literally the entire team wants high level docs and he just keeps saying jUsT wRiTe gO0D CoDe or JuST rEAd tHe c0De)
I could see your point in something like IT that changes as rapidly as it does. There are other fields out there that don’t really change much in the past 20-30 years. But good for you.
Just… be careful with being smug about being newer to the field. There’s plenty of shit that no longer applies, but just as much that still does.
For every brand new way of doing things there are multiple pieces of software, hardware, and programming libraries that are just repeated iterations on the original carrying forward the oddities from the past. I’ve lost track of how many times the solution to why something wasn’t working as expected couldn’t be found in the current documentation, but was instead a strange limitation or edge case of the tech it was built on top of, revealed by one of the greybeards on my team having come across it before.
LOL. Yea, I work in IT and have to listen to boomers tell me about their 30 years of IT experience and why I’m wrong.
They mistake 30 year old experience that is no longer relevant with practical experience that is relevant today. It’s a subtle but important difference. In my experience, the people who have to prove themselves by telling you about how much experience they have are the least competent.
Results will dictate how competent you are. Not how much experience you claim to have.
Yes.
Oh
Experience is worth a lot. Even idiots with a lot of experience can be very good at something. Smarter people need less experience to be good at something - but they still need it. As for changing technology - IT changes but the principles remain the same. Plus there’s a lot of soft skills that never change. Being able to talk to people, manage expectations, guide clients in the right directions, etc… That’s worth a lot more in the long term than being up to date with every new tool or framework.
My manager’s manager and I were having a heated debate about why we need documentation in the company (it was a major reason for delays in my team) and he pulled this BS on me: “I’ve been doing this job for 10 years, documentation goes stale.”
Yeah and so does bread. Should that mean we should never bake bread? (obviously a joke, but really, so fucking what if it goes stale and we have to spend an hour a week keeping it up to date? Literally the entire team wants high level docs and he just keeps saying jUsT wRiTe gO0D CoDe or JuST rEAd tHe c0De)
I could see your point in something like IT that changes as rapidly as it does. There are other fields out there that don’t really change much in the past 20-30 years. But good for you.
Just… be careful with being smug about being newer to the field. There’s plenty of shit that no longer applies, but just as much that still does.
For every brand new way of doing things there are multiple pieces of software, hardware, and programming libraries that are just repeated iterations on the original carrying forward the oddities from the past. I’ve lost track of how many times the solution to why something wasn’t working as expected couldn’t be found in the current documentation, but was instead a strange limitation or edge case of the tech it was built on top of, revealed by one of the greybeards on my team having come across it before.
nah lol. as much as things change, base things i learned 20 years ago DEFINITELY still apply today. Don’t overlook old dogs.