Skip to main content

Aged Out

I still recall quite clearly how it was to be in my 20s and brand new to the workforce. At first, it was overwhelming and then in a bit I found my groove. Around me were peers who came out of college all guns blazing confident that they were the smartest people in the room. There were plenty of those. Some of those folks did deliver outstanding work - maybe their life's best work. Back in the day, I did not notice how those several decades older than us felt about about our demeanor. Youth can be myopic that way. Reading about what it means to be older in the tech business resonates deeply with me, specially the woman's point of view

"She's been fighting, and winning, this kind of thing her whole career, she says. As a young woman it was almost worse, she says. She was constantly being told she was too young (or too young looking) to get choice assignments or promotions. That didn't stop her either."

A young woman pays a penalty for her perceived naivete and gets stuck on assignments that are of career limiting nature. If she is lucky enough to break free from that cycle before she is too old, she can make some decent strides in her career until she hits the speed bump for being too old or god forbid too old looking. So the window of opportunity is really small if you are a woman and it would be wise to keep that free and clear of personal commitments that take away from being able to dive into work. For many women that career window opens just when her biological clock is starting to slow down. There is a great unfairness to it all. 

The upshot is, tech workers need to understand that they'll be fighting the perception of being "outdated" as their careers mature. As long as they can show that they are masters of the new stuff as well as the old, ageism will be more like an annoying fly, something to swat away, than a deadly virus.

If you have been around long enough, you realize that most current fads are old ideas rehashed and sold as new. The fad of the day will become outdated in a year if not a few months. Those of us who have chased after many shiny objects back in the day, might feel jaded about keeping up with the latest. We might prefer to see the dust settle and spend our time more wisely. Yet, we make such choices at our own peril.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more