
What Could I Possibly Learn From a Mentor Half My Age - ageek123
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/business/what-could-i-possibly-learn-from-a-mentor-half-my-age.html
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mindcrime
I totally believe that everybody has something to offer to everybody else. I'm
43, can I learn from a 23 year old? Abso-lutely! And vice-versa, of course.

But... I really reject this whole "millenials as digital natives" narrative,
in terms of the idea that millenials have some unique relationship to
technology and some innate sort of technological prowess. It's just a
rehashing of an earlier idea which dates back at least to the 80's, where
"kids have to program their parents VCR's". There's always this notion that
"the young" \- at a point in time - are more technical. But in absolute terms?
Well, Gen-X kids grew up with access to computers and a lot of technology as
well, although it was (obviously) the technology of the the time. I would
posit that there's no reason to assume that a Millenial would be any more
inherently technical than a Gen-X'er.

~~~
massysett
Indeed, I think it's insulting to old and young alike to assume that the young
know more about "technology".

At this point my sister-in-law (10 years older than I) and my mother-in-law
(30 years older) know more about social networking and Facebook than I do,
because I do not use these things and they use them almost daily. Plenty of
old people know how to use computers and technology. Plenty of young people do
not.

Furthermore, just knowing how to use Snapchat is not really knowing about
"technology," any more than knowing how to drive a car makes one a mechanical
engineer or knowing how to plug a gizmo into the wall means one knows about
electrical theory. So there are some newer things out there that use a
smartphone. So what; knowing how to use them does not make one knowledgeable
about technology or smart.

If this writer wanted to know how to use Snapchat, good. Find someone who
knows how to use Snapchat. One's Snapchat abilities has nothing to do with
one's age.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think it's a good moment to bring up the immortal essay:

[http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
co...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

~~~
teekert
Haha, one to keep around: _" The parents seem to have some vague concept that
spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort
of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell."_

And it's so true, you know, you learn about computers when you need a floppy
with drivers for the 4x cd-rom drive you just installed yourself (or when you
later install Slackware and then Gentoo... also helps). You don't learn about
computers using a modern smartphone.

I like this part a lot: _I 've messed up, as I'm sure many of you have. When
we purchased an XBox it was Techno-Dad to the rescue. I happily played about
with the mess of cables and then created profiles for everyone. When my son's
MacBook was infected with the FlashBack virus Techno-Dad to the rescue. I
looked up some on-line guides and then hammered away in the terminal until I
had eradicated that bad-boy. When we purchased a 'Family Raspberry Pi' Techno-
Dad to the rescue. I hooked it all up, flashed an OS to the SD-card and then
sat back proudly, wondering why nobody other than me wanted to use the blasted
thing. All through their lives, I've done it for them. Set-up new hardware,
installed new software and acted as in-house technician whenever things went
wrong. As a result, I have a family of digital illiterates._

------
jcadam
We hired a new grad last year... he's very sharp, though of course
inexperienced when it comes to working as part of a team on a large project
(but time will fix that).

Now, I have no idea how this is possible, but he has deeper knowledge of Hg
and Git than anyone I've ever met (If your experience is limited to school and
solo personal projects, how in the world do you develop advanced knowledge of
version control? On my personal projects, I rarely need anything more than git
add/commit/push/pull and basic branching).

I'm over 10 years older than this guy, but I find myself asking his advice
whenever I need to do something advanced or out of the ordinary with Git.

~~~
pacala
Deep knowledge of git is a sign of immaturity :) There are literally 10
commands one will ever need, which can be conveniently aliased to something
more sane. Keep the brain space for something that produces higher value add.

~~~
copperx
Some day you will be caught in a corner case and you'll spend half a day
learning about git's internals.

~~~
pacala
I've been using git for 7 years now, never had the need to go deeper. Lately,
I'm using github and pushing / saving my work every so often [kind of like
CTRL + S in Windows Office in the '90s]. If something goes wrong, happy to
yank the local git and start with a fresh clone from github :)

~~~
mixmastamyk
[https://www.xkcd.com/1597/](https://www.xkcd.com/1597/)

------
inputcoffee
In tech, some people (not you, other people) might need an article titled

What Could I Possibly Learn From a Mentor _Twice_ My Age?

~~~
Normal_gaussian
How to get to out of the typing pool for one.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
As this quick comment has attracted a few downvotes I think I shall elaborate:

Back in the days of my grandmother large organisations had typing pools. When
trying to progress a career many found themselves stuck in the pool, or
remaining as generic, exchangeable, secretaries.

It was well known that to progress onto the better compensated, less intense,
more fulfilling jobs (personal secretary, group secretary, all kinds of
travelling roles) you had to show you were capable.

The trick to this was, as it is with any career, identifying which projects
will develop the right skills and expose you to the right people.

This is a soft skill, and befriending an older woman who would help you choose
projects was recognised as a way to get out quickly.

There are many parallels between this and any career, however I see a very
literal one for programmers.

Consulting someone twice my age (in my case friends from traditional
engineering disciplines) about the opportunities I have had available has
helped me immensely.

~~~
inputcoffee
Thanks for the clarification.

I didn't downvote it but I had no idea what the sentence meant.

I think that second "to" was a typo, but it lead to weird alternative ways to
parse the sentence.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
Oh wow. Now I can see it that is great

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Normal_gaussian
> It was not easy, partly because the software is not intuitive

Damn right. You hear a product is good, you go out and get it, and then you
try and use it. Like always you hit a roadblock and you RTFM.

But this time there isn't a manual, no dense text with an index of all the
weird and wonderful functions you could master to be an expert.

No this time you only get a string of badly written blog posts, verbose and
out of date.

~~~
devilsavocado
Reading that snapchat is not intuitive is always weird for me. It was the most
immediately obvious and intuitive app I've ever used.

Maybe you are thinking it is a lot more complex than it actually is? Take a
picture then select who you send it to. Swipe left to see pictures sent to
you. Swipe right to see pictures people have posted for everyone. That's 99%
of it. There is no need for an index of functions that can be mastered as
there only are a handful of functions.

~~~
LukeShu
Things in Snapchat that aren't intuitive, off the top of my head:

1\. Why are my snaps significantly blurrier than the pictures from the normal
camera app? (a: you have to explicitly tap the main part of the screen to get
it to focus, then take the snap. Why does it not focus automatically when
taking the snap?)

2\. Why does it do significantly worse in low-light than the normal camera
app? (Is it just a problem with Snapchat, or do I need to manually do
something that the machine should do, like in #1?)

3\. What do the emojis next to names in the friends list mean? (I found a
table with the meanings on some spammy website.)

4\. What do the smileys that sometimes pop up in chat mean?

5\. Why does the menu button not work like it does in _every single_ other
app? Sure, "swipe down, then tap the gear" isn't hard, but they removed the
mechanism that I'm conditioned to expect to work.

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ci5er
It isn't just technical or process skills.

People are wired differently. I know people who are much younger than I am who
are much wiser than I am at the ways of the human animal. I rely on a couple
of them to be able to, after a meeting where some strange interpersonal thing
happened, simply ask: "what just happened there"?

Everyone has their own personal set of cognitive blind spots and may need
assistance for navigating those types of situations. For me, simply learning
where my blind spots are, identifying who doesn't have my particular
combination of defects (regardless of age), and being able to develop a
relationship with them so that I can ask them for navigational assistance does
wonders.

------
Benjammer
>America’s younger workers have already been “personal technology consultants
in their own families, so it’s a role they’re very comfortable playing,” she
said.

Fuck all of that noise.

I'll teach you how to use something if you really want to learn it, but I'm
not going to be the guy you just hand your laptop to and go "Fix it for me I
don't know how to do it you're so much better at it than I am."

------
vonnik
I like to think of people as having chronological age as well as a [skill]
age, with chronological age being largely irrelevant among adults. I'm 41 and
my co-founder is 27. He had been programming Java for 7 years when I met him,
and now he's a decade in. He has taught me a ton about programming, and I
expect the lessons to continue. As a person gets older and specializes, the
likelihood that someone younger than them, on a separate path, will have a
higher [skill] age increases, which means they need to be increasingly open to
learning from chronologically younger people.

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wangchow
My philosophy is that everyone has useful nuggets of information to share,
regardless of age, gender, race, etc. Take it all while ya can. Learn from
everyone.

~~~
mindcrime
_“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically
your own.”_ ~~ Bruce Lee

------
runjake
Lots. I learn from my kids who are 1/7th of my age all the time. Not so much
from the experiences of raising them, but from their insights and
observations. A couple of times, their observations about something have blown
my mind.

You only have to be open and humble.

~~~
mgrennan
yes, Knowledge is a two way street. We can learn from each other. Age bias is
bad both ways. The saying "Its hard to teach old dogs new ticks" is WRONG and
this articular stinks of it.

~~~
blackbagboys
Unfortunately, it's a saying that is rooted in truth; as you grow older, your
neural plasticity and fluid intelligence steadily declines, and so learning
new tricks is, perhaps not impossible, but certainly more difficult - so it's
important to recognize this and make the extra effort to remain open to new
ideas and new experiences, the way one does almost unconsciously in youth.

------
DavidWanjiru
Instead of being indignant that we can be "mentored" by a person half our age,
let's rephrase the question and ask, "What could I possibly LEARN from a
person half my age?"

Well, almost everything. Your typical grandparent was probably taught how to
use the new technology of their day by their grand kids. People not half their
age, but something like a fifth or even a tenth their age.

I've read about a guy, I think his name is Tao and I'm sure HNers are familiar
with him, who got his math PhD at 21 and was teching undergrads while a young
teen. Could you be twice his age and learn from him? Is that a trick question?

I think the reason this is even a talking point at all is that the word mentor
implies imparting knowledge gained from experience, and since experience
correlates to age, we inevitably wonder how a person younger than you could be
more experienced than you. But really, the thing we are after is knowledge
regardless of how it was acquired. When you look at it like that, the age of
your source of knowledge becomes a complete non issue.

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AndrewKemendo
Isn't this what is supposed to happen? I mean the whole point of education
from the early days is that everyone is collectively standing on the shoulders
of the previous generation.

If the idea of accelerating knowledge acquisition - across all domains - is
working, then it stands to reason that those with the most plastic brains and
access to a wealth of knowledge, as well as tools to figure out what is
relevant and contextual, will be able to outperform those who have well worn
cognitive paths.

Seems like a great thing to me - but terrifying for anyone who is used to the
idea that more time = better.

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mathattack
During my first job out of undergrad, I recall a fairly senior and well
respected IT director who didn't use a computer, and didn't read email. He was
good at "being strategic" and "delivering for customers". While both of those
are great things, I vowed never to become him. The only way to stay vital and
connected is to hang out with the young, as well as the old. Just never ever
talk pop culture.

------
cosinetau
My $0.02/anecdote:

Before I became a software engineer, I was a math supplementary instructor at
a community college in my hometown. I love teaching, talking about and
thinking about math.

Some of my favorite students were the older students that already had
preconceived notions about their abilities with math, what things meant or how
things fit together.

I discovered those things they brought with them were great vehicles for
bending my explanations in such a way that they could understand them.

Eventually this occurred often enough you work a lot of that into how you talk
about the subject, and I feel this made me a better/more effective teacher,
more often, than I had been before.

Onto the subject, in my new job, one of the other engineers I work closely
with is what I would consider non-trivially younger than me. (I'm in my late
20s)

It set me back a smidge to learn that when I did. But in the time I've been
here, and that isn't very long, I've learned an incredible amount from him.

I found and this article only confirms that closing yourself off from even a
little only hurts the self and is very narrow minded.

Good stuff can come from anywhere.

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ascendantlogic
Well right off the top of my head my first thought was "A different way of
looking at things".

People always have a different perspective to offer, regardless of age.

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thaw13579
As others have said, a lot! I think this is what keeps many teachers engaged--
they learn from their students as well.

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thaw13579
On somewhat of a tangent, I have to wonder if Snapchat is an appropriate
medium for reporting news...

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daxfohl
"My Little Sister Taught Me How To Snapchat Like The Teens"

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-
the-t...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-
teens?utm_term=.pw773lbXk#.rg5n19yKp)

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0xdeadbeefbabe
How to pretend?

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ben_says
with that attitude... nothing.

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jbb555
The answers appears to be "snapchat" according to the article. So nothing
useful then.

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ageek123
Great article showing that in tech, mentoring can go both ways.

