> Managing people especially older people has been awful
I am really curious about this. What did you find awful about managing older people?
Generalising perhaps too much, I find older people generally easier to work with than younger people. They seem more sensible, like they have become comfortable with themselves.
Well I guess giving you a number may make a little more sense. The team is 4 65+ year olds, a 25 year old and me at 31 (there have been some younger interns too.) The 65+ crowd don't care to learn new things (ie git, using json with javascript, ORM frameworks, any type of bash commands) they're just skating into retirement copying/pasting the same train of thought for the past decade. At least the younger ones care a little more about self development.
That's not been my experience with most older people, but I can imagine, especially with those looking forward to retirement and leaving work behind.
I've found older people willing and interested to learn and use new things including tools and languages, wherever things take them, while also calm like they aren't trying to prove something any more. I'd like to think it's because I inspire and make things interesting and fun :-)
Like you I have found the younger ones care a lot about self development.
A small number of those have been difficult to work with, wanting to prove how "right" they are to people who are effectively above me in some hierarchy, which boils down to being argumentative, not caring about my point of view and making things more office-political than they needed to be.
Mostly, though, I found younger ones friendly and eager to learn things and have challenges, somewhat self-conscious and self-doubtful, and having a more modern social conscience, e.g. climate concerns. Overall pretty nice people.
Although I've seen projects where there was way too much copy/paste, it's been from all ages. Maybe different reasons underlie why though. At times I almost seem to specialise in writing scripts to de-duplicate other people's giant copy/pasta code and detect variations to maintain its behaviour :-)
I am really curious about this. What did you find awful about managing older people?
Generalising perhaps too much, I find older people generally easier to work with than younger people. They seem more sensible, like they have become comfortable with themselves.