Working under younger and inexperienced people

[Ahsan Saeed]

Hi all,

I got interviewed by people who were of my age and had less experience than what I have. I had applied for the position of J2ME Developer and I have three years of J2ME experience.

I am 26 and would like to work with senior engineers so that I can learn stuff. No point in working for people who have less experience than what I have and then getting orders from them as well. Is being a rich kid the only requirement for becoming the CTO/GM of a company? I don�t think I will feel really comfortable in such an environment.

How do you people react to such situations and what should be done to make things work.

Ahsan

[Luke Kolin]

Originally posted by Ahsan Saeed:
I am 26 and would like to work with senior engineers so that I can learn stuff. No point in working for people who have less experience than what I have and then getting orders from them as well. Is being a rich kid the only requirement for becoming the CTO/GM of a company? I don�t think I will feel really comfortable in such an environment.

What makes you assume that since you have more quantitative experience than these people, that you cannot learn from them?

I am in my 30s. The only thing guaranteed about my experience is that I have consumed more oxygen than you.

Cheers!

Luke

[Don Stadler]

Luke is correct. In my C days I learned memory management from a sprig just out of grad school. He rather looked down on me and failed to realize that I could get the same functionality as he in 1/3rd to 1/2 the LOC's he was writing. I learned memory management, he learned nothing.

Who won? You learn whatever you can wherever you can!

[Eric Lemaitre]

Hi Ahsan,

I am 26 and would like to work with senior engineers so that I can learn stuff. No point in working for people who have less experience than what I have and then getting orders from them as well. Is being a rich kid the only requirement for becoming the CTO/GM of a company? I don�t think I will feel really comfortable in such an environment.
How do you people react to such situations and what should be done to make things work.

I think you are making some real mistakes, but easy to overrun :

_ You look with contempt at "rich kid CTO/GM", but even if they are what makes you so sure they are worthless ? As certain as you must have some real value at your company, as likely most if not all all of your colleages must have some real value too, as yourself. Respect your colleages and know them better, you will surely discover they have qualities you didn't notice yet. Of course you still may be right and be ruled by some worthless people, but it happens too in life so once you are fed up simply quit and go elsewhere without turmoil.

_ I am certain you are taking things the wrong way, first thing to determine is : are you happy in YOUR OWN job (learn things, correct wages, interesting stuff, ...), don't take the others as criteria for being well. A famous french author said for qualifying such attitude kind of "It is not enough being happy, for being really happy the others must not be". This is your life, think to yourself first and help the others if you can afford it, but do not determine only through the others.

_ You may be good and gifted, but you will always find better people than yourself, so remain humble and respectful, in IT world you always continuously learn new things and improve.

In conclusion make a balance of what you like and dislike at your present post, and as long as it suits your interests stay there since no job is perfect anyway. When balance becomes unfarourable, quit for a new experience, but might be worse, you know what you leave but don't know what you'll find.

Best regards.

[Steven Bell]

Originally posted by Luke Kolin:

I am in my 30s. The only thing guaranteed about my experience is that I have consumed more oxygen than you.

Luke

What if I do alot of arobic exersize?

[Tim Holloway]

Originally posted by Luke Kolin:


What makes you assume that since you have more quantitative experience than these people, that you cannot learn from them?

Correct. No significant technology can be totally mastered, since A) technology is a moving target, B) it's generally too complex to cram it entirely in one's own brain, and C) Implementations generally prove to have hidden "gotcha"s that the spec didn't address that someone else may have worked their way through.

Even if you Know it All (as I do, of course ), there's still the likelihood that you'll gain insight when you have to explain it to the Less Fortunate.

The only case where I'd flat-out-avoid people is if THEY're too arrogant to work with ME.

Besides, I make it a policy to never work for employers who are more arrogant than I am. Fortunately, that leaves plenty of room.

[soniya saxena]

I am 26 and would like to work with senior engineers so that I can learn stuff. No point in working for people who have less experience than what I have and then getting orders from them as well.
But what if senior people dont want to work with you because they cant learn anything from you

[Edwin Keeton]

I am now in my 50s so automatically if I work for somebody they are younger than me. Although I've programmed successfully in several different languages, platforms, etc., I still haven't done it all.

Just for example, I'm beginning to learn JSF. Fortunately, although I thought it was unfortunate at the time, I did a little C# and ASP.Net web programming, and the pattern is somewhat similar to JSF. But I still have a lot to learn from that snotty, bratty kid who hardly knows anything else but JSF. As Tim implied, you can even learn a lot from people who don't know as much as you do. Regardless of their age or nominal years of experience.

Whoever has financial power over you is always going to be a pain because he's always going to be asking a bunch of annoying questions. And if you don't think up enough of the answers he wants to hear, you might soon be out of work. Dangerous territory when you have serious financial obligations. That's just part of the nature of work. You can't avoid it. Even running the company, or your own company, somebody is always asking those pesky questions. They always seem to be some variant of "what have you done for me lately"?

[Suman Sarker]

Originally posted by soniya saxena:
But what if senior people dont want to work with you because they cant learn anything from you

That's Bullseye!

[Don Stadler]

Originally posted by Edwin Keeton:

I am now in my 50s so automatically if I work for somebody they are younger than me. Although I've programmed successfully in several different languages, platforms, etc., I still haven't done it all.

Yep. I'll never see 45 again either. False pride is one of the big things that prematurely ends careers in our field. It can keep you from learning the new things which come out, and that bad habit will bury you, sooner or later.

Originally posted by Edwin Keeton:

Just for example, I'm beginning to learn JSF. Fortunately, although I thought it was unfortunate at the time, I did a little C# and ASP.Net web programming, and the pattern is somewhat similar to JSF. But I still have a lot to learn from that snotty, bratty kid who hardly knows anything else but JSF. As Tim implied, you can even learn a lot from people who don't know as much as you do. Regardless of their age or nominal years of experience.

True. And if the brat doesn't learn from you in turn he may end up leaving the profession before you do! This too shall pass should be engraved over the entrance of every school of Computer Science.

Originally posted by Edwin Keeton:

Whoever has financial power over you is always going to be a pain because he's always going to be asking a bunch of annoying questions. And if you don't think up enough of the answers he wants to hear, you might soon be out of work. Dangerous territory when you have serious financial obligations. That's just part of the nature of work. You can't avoid it. Even running the company, or your own company, somebody is always asking those pesky questions. They always seem to be some variant of "what have you done for me lately"?

My current gig is batch work on an uber-large Oracle DB, and my team lead is maybe 15 years younger than me. He seemed inclined to look down on me a bit at first but has since come around. It might have something to do with a recent performance test which showed my batch job running nearly 3 times as fast. They had thought it was as fast as it could go so that came as a surprise....
[ May 27, 2005: Message edited by: Don Stadler ]

[Vishwa Kumba]

I came across a couple of junior guys who had good amount of knowledge and intelligence. Even though they were less experienced than me, I did a learn a lot from them. They were very humble too. Nice guys! .

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by Don Stadler:
True. And if the brat doesn't learn from you in turn he may end up leaving the profession before you do! This too shall pass should be engraved over the entrance of every school of Computer Science.

I agree, that phrase or its variant "��s ofereode,�isses swa m�g!" (That was overcome, so will this) should be in everyone's toolkit. Here's the original. Over the years I've outlived many of those.

[amit taneja]

GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY,
GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.
Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.