Ahhhh! Okay, quickly now, before I forget.
A while ago I got an email via the Seattle Critical Mass website which I inherited when the last person hosting it had some issues with their hosting company. This fella had something like thirty years of experience commuting by bicycle and had a thing or two to say about us kids blocking traffic. I told him he was a stupid old man… wait, no. Actually, we had a bit of a discourse and I never heard back from him, so maybe he got my message about thinking about his accusations and researching them before making broad statements about their validity. Anyway, the point is the whole “I was cycling while you were still in the womb” part (yes, he said something like that).
When I was a teenager working with technology, I had pretty strong hate for age discrimination. It bugged me when I knew more than someone, but they either didn’t stop to realize that or they did realize that and it punctured their self-esteem. After a certain point that all calmed down, and people generally tend to think I am older than I am because of my experience now. Still, the implication that being old means you have more experience bugs me sometimes. There’s a general argument against this that you could have been doing stupid shit for those thirty years. Experience isn’t always progressive.
I’ve avoided telling ARC a whole lot about my computer experience until recently because I wanted to stop short of anyone asking me to fix their computer, but I spoke up recently about a problem with the esvolunteers website. As soon as I thought about saying, “I’ve been working in IT for fifteen years” I fell on the floor in epileptic shock. Okay, maybe, sorta almost. I settled with starting off the paragraph with:
About 15 years ago I started to learn to build and troubleshoot workstations. Since then I have progressively found more interesting things to do. These days I run the production systems for a web based service for a local company.
Granted, experience can mean a lot. I can only do what I do now because of my experience elsewhere, including outside of technology. But it is not the determining factor. In job postings under ‘required qualifications’ some friends of mine end with ‘Awesomeness trumps all other requirements.’