> One of the things that galls me about this industry is its belief that experience (which is not the same thing as age) is a negative. I see this as something

> One of the things that galls me about this industry is its belief that experience (which is not the same thing as age) is a negative. I see this as something that shifts during economic cycles. For example, right now nobody appreciates much that came from those who survived the dot-com bust. Those skills will be invaluable in the next downturn, whenever that happens. Regarding "TwiFaceGoogSoft": there is an old maxim -- never hire anyone directly from {big-tech-co}, if that's the only place they've ever worked. (In the 1980s, it was IBM. In the 1990s, it was Microsoft. In the 2000s, it was Google.) The maxim developed because those ex-big-co employees were perceived as failures when encountering a non-advantaged environment. The prevailing wisdom was to hire those people "once-removed" from those companies, so they wouldn't learn those lessons on your dime. It might not be fair, but the perception has remained for a long time, even as the big-co name has changed. In the end, as an industry we need to simply get better at hiring. All these biases only serve to screw us up.