Comment Re:Old needs to be special (Score 1) 375
Unfortunately that means the industry doesn't appreciate the value of experienced generalists who, unlike the pups, have very broad perspective and years of experience. Studies have shown that experience beats education alone: graduates are very green. For the industry not to get this is absurd, especially when the average age of the US workforce is probably increasing. More experienced oldies should actually be a *boost* to the industry. By all means, fill up the design and product development departments with cool kiddies but make sure an old fart is looking over the partition to ensure they don't wreck the company.
Cf some other engineering disciplines where experience generalists are actually respected. Management itself is a generalist (multidisciplinary) activity that pretends to be specialist. Field managers are often engineers who have moved sideways out of their original speciality. In a major company I worked for, senior site engineers would rotate over different disciplines with each new project. A civil engineer was expected to understand what the EEs were doing in broad strokes for example. That meant they all got tons of experience in tightly interconnected facets of the work and could step into each others shoes at short notice. Even specialists would get redeployed on occasion and put on site to take on a more general engineering management role - mainly tracking contractor work quality and negotiating solutions. When building a real product of some kind, you need generalists to manage the specialists.