Comment Re:I get it. (Score 1) 110
all else being equal I would be more likely to hire a more experienced worker over a new grad
Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.
In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, and those approaching retirement finish out their careers training everybody, mostly just supervising and commenting, and that's a good thing for knowledge transfer, both for institutional knowledge and collective wisdom across the industry.
In corporate environments people want to hire already-trained, drop-in experts. Phrases like "hit the ground running", rather than "six month training period", unless the worker themselves are expected to pay for that training period. Companies see training, mentorship, and learning as something people do on their own time, not something the company does. And there's no retirement phase where the declining workers spend their days passing along their institutional knowledge, they're fired the moment after passing their peak, and the institutional knowledge vanishes.