[Motorola Droid X2] LaserChicken:
Whoa horsey!!

Coming from an IT project manager of nearly 20 years, I have to say...

Whoa horsey! You're WAY off base here. I don't mean to be terse with you, but I have a pretty large sore spot for discrimination of any kind, especially age, gender and race. You push one of these buttons, you'll hear from Mr. Terse himself. And uh oh, here he comes now!

1. Age. Age does impact our ability learn new information, but it's not a be-all-end-all marking stick for whether or not a person is bright or capable. I have a database programmer I call on for heavy jobs. His name is Faraz, he speaks 5 languages, is a genius with Oracle and at 62 years of age, still runs marathons. Oh, and he was born in abject poverty, in 3rd world conditions--didn't slow him then, doesn't slow him now. Not only can I call on him to be a master of Oracle, but being that he's a tried and true genius, I can call on him for just about anything.

Not everyone is a Faraz, nor as COSTLY as a Faraz. Sometimes we have to match our expectations with what we're willing to pay.

Meet Tim, 66 years old--he sucked at all things operating system, all things networking and all things personal device. On top of that, in between tickets, he'd fall asleep at his desk. Why was he a tech guy? Why was he on the team? He was a MASTER of commercial printers. We sent him to clear all the tickets created by IBM, Cannon, HP, etc. Sometimes we had to send him on a regular call because the queue was backed up. He struggled on those kind of tickets and we made sure to avoid giving them to him when possible. Any time someone complained about his lacking of OS knowledge, we'd just ask them if they'd like the plotter to keep working, all for the low price of 16 bucks per hour.

Aside from that, Tim added to our team/family in a human way. The younger guys looked at him as a grandfather who was kind and had great stories to tell, as well, they admired his tenacity. I wouldn't have replaced him with a new graduate from MIT.

2. Let's be fair, teaching isn't all encompassing either, why do you expect a tech person to do what you can't do in your own field? Unless of course you're suggesting that because you teach, you can teach every field with mastery? Hmm? Can you teach both Chemistry and Programming, then jump over to French?

Being realist, a given teacher might be amazing at bringing knowledge to students in biology, but be lacking in physics. This is the same with tech, you might have a good hardware guy who might not be the best software guy, like Tim. The difference between tech support and teaching is expectation; teachers aren't expected to be masters of every subject. Unfortunately, the mistake many end users (and management) make is that of inappropriate expectation--many have an expectation that a tech support guy should and does support every OS and all hardware. The inappropriate expectation usually sounds like this, "Oh, you're an IT guy? Could you fix my e-mail, build me a website, design a logo, write content, develop a private encryption tool and design for us a faster processor?". This just isn't true, it's not the way it works. The tech field is vast and we'd ALL be much happier if the expectations were more realistic.

3. The problem you had today probably has less to do with your tech guy than it does with management and your facilities expectation of its technical personnel. You folks are lacking talented administration, that's my feeling. I'm sure if your guy was properly managed and used within his actual field of expertise, he'd do just fine.

4. Of course there is a chance they hired a moron, but morons come in all shapes, colors and age ranges. I've hired both older and younger folks who talked a big game and walked around with exaggerated resumes. Two months down the road, they are drinking beer during lunch, letting tickets slip and demanding raises because they didn't know how to negotiate--and all while performing like caca.