fchen 34442 (6/14/2013)
If I was a business owner (one day!), I would want my development team to be younger, being guided by those who have the experience to prevent, to the best of their abilities as managers, the pitfalls of the young generation being too courageous (= dumb).
what an odd point of view. I guess you must be too young to have discovered that often the youngsters are the stick-in-the-muds who think that the only way to do anything is the way they were taught in college, perhaps because they don't realise that isn't possible to learn all the various ways to do something and the advantages and disadvantages of each way during a 4 year degree course. It's usually also youngsters who are very cautious, not willing to look for a new way of doing something, not ready to challenge "received wisdom". Some of us older types have learnt that "received wisdom" and "what everybody knows" are usually wrong, that we often can't know which way is best without doing quite a lot of investigation (and that we may still get it wrong even having investigated), and that if you are trying to do something that hasn't been done before you may have to throw away the book.
But we can't all be managers just because we have tenure.
I've never had the misfortune to work anywhere where there was a concept of being manager through having tenure. Do such places exist in the real world, as opposed to in bad novels, in staged farces, and in TV sitcoms?
So while there is definitely a push out there to promote the young who may be more in tune (and more flexible) to adopt newer technologies
In my experience, it was the older and more experienced people who were prepared to accept change and adopt newer technologies.
Actually, I think merit-based pay and benefits are a great idea. So is merit-based promotion when it's possible to determine the merits (in the context of the new job) of someone you are considering promoting; unfortunately, often you are guessing about those merits - how do you tell whether a developer will make a good team leader? Whether a developer will make a good system designer/architect, even? Whether a good team leader will make a good department head/programme manager/tap manager/division manager/CTO/CIO? If someone is a good developer, can write good technical reports, and can give decent presentations that doesn't necessarily mean that he could lead a team effectively; even if he can do a good job of mentoring one junior, can he cope with a team of five? This is where the meritocracy concept breaks - it's easy to base rewards on merit, and merit can drive promotions that are really nothing more than job title changes, but promoting someone into a radically different job isn't going to be based on observation of merit at doing that job.
Tom