There is a difference between "ageism", and "being honest about how hard some problems are to solve".
There are a lot of unbelievably brilliant 22-year-olds.
None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.
There are certainly a lot of 22 year olds that have been led to believe that they’re unbelievably brilliant.
I’m sure some of them are. I’m sure a lot of 22 year olds were brilliant in the 80’s and 90’s too.
Unless your thesis is that there’s been a sudden upsurge in the proportion of superintelligent earthlings in the last 25 years I’m unsure what your point is.
> None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.
Exactly! If you’ve been doing that for 20 years I do not want to work with you, since you are apparently perfectly content with that status quo.
I’ve been doing it for two years and it’s already too much. My highest priority is fixing their chronically useless requirements.
I’m glad you’ve clarified as when you said that it sounded like you’re astonished at the level of apathy and/or incompetence you’re surrounded with and I was worried for a second that you’ve just too little experience to understand that your predecessors have very likely been trying for much of that time to push back against the status quo and have better ideas implemented, likely swimming upstream against resistance you’re wholly unaware of.
But it’s clearly not that after all, which is a relief - I’m glad it’s just a case of everyone else that’s come before you being useless.
Is it just me, or are you being needlessly sarcastic here?
The resistance is ridiculous, but it’s still the single most valuable thing we can be doing to improve our project delivery.
Given the current division of people that care/not care (or are disinclined to act on it?). It is entirely likely that none of my predecessors did.
That said, if they had been doing it (and made any progress), I really wonder what the previous situation was. Maybe there just weren’t any requirements at all?
From experience I would suggest that it's very likely they had a very clear idea of where the problems were and tried to solve them, but found that they were not a priority upstream.
It's still an absurd situation, but I doubt very much it's the result of apathy - or at the very least the result of apathy from your direct predecessors.
Doing something for 20 years does not necessarily make someone better at it than someone who’s done it for 5 years. Arguably doing something for that long could even make you worse.
There is a difference between "ageism", and "being honest about how hard some problems are to solve".
There are a lot of unbelievably brilliant 22-year-olds.
None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.