Recently, I had a conversation with a hiring manager who had posted a job opening that sought junior people (less than five years of experience) for a particular assignment.
As we discussed the work, he said, "It's not about the pay rate. We're ok for funding. It's about the culture of a startup." He went on to describe not just the frenetic pace of the work, but, more particularly, the lack of structure in communications and decision-making. People who knew things were doing things and generally didn't have the cycles to sit down and write formal specifications. Those same smart and busy people often communicated irregularly, not necessarily because they were social misfits, but because they were just too damn busy.
More experienced workers, this manager had discovered, may have had the More junior people didn't have the backdrop of well-balanced workdays and figured that this craziness was and is normal. They didn't know any better and so could adapt better.
This manager was a gray-beard like yours truly. His comments weren't directed at people of a certain age, although the correlation between experience and age is hard to miss. No, it's about temperament.
We get old not when we lose energy or have aches or our stories trail off with lost characters fighting forgotten battles. No, that's not when we get old. We get old when we stop being able to see the world as it is and as it's becoming.
In part, then, age bias is less about not being able to do the work and more about the stereotype that we're not willing.
via Prejudices: third series, Volume 3 By Henry Louis Mencken
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