Stop Taking Career Advice From Old People
It was about five years ago, in my mid-30s, when I realized something uncomfortable: I was already out of touch with the labor market for young STEM graduates.
That’s right. Barely twelve years after graduating, I no longer felt qualified to give engineering students or new grads advice on how to get a job. I could still speak confidently about how to do the job once you were in, how to navigate corporate life, how to grow, how to get promoted, but not how to break through the front door.
Too much had changed. Automation. Remote work. Applicant tracking systems. Credential inflation. The whole game had quietly shifted while I wasn’t looking.
I realized just how out of touch I was after a call with a young engineering student, who was introduced through friends of my parents and who had been encouraged to “reach out to Slavi, he’s in engineering consulting.” I went into that call assuming I’d be the one doing most of the teaching.
Instead, every piece of advice I offered was met with, “That doesn’t really work anymore because of X, Y, and Z.”
At first, I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. She had done her homework. At 20, she understood the current labor market better than I did at 35. What I thought would be a 30-minute mentoring call turned into a 90-minute masterclass for me. I walked away stunned, and, honestly, taken down a peg or two. I was shown so many blind spots I had developed over the years.
That conversation didn’t stop me from giving advice altogether, but it permanently changed how I give it. Now I preface almost everything with disclaimers like:
“This may not apply anymore.”
“Only take the parts that feel relevant and ignore the rest.”
Sometimes I refuse outright and suggest they speak to a recent grad instead and then I offer to connect them with someone at our firm who’s only a year or two out of school. That, more often than not, is far more valuable.
Why You Should Not Listen to Old People
Markets change fast. They’ve always changed, but the pace over the last decade has been something else entirely.
The experience your parents had entering the workforce is no longer valid.
The experience I had is no longer valid.
Young people do themselves a disservice when they blindly listen to “how it worked back in my day.” And older people should feel at least a little embarrassed when they assume they still understand the world today’s 20-year-olds are walking into.
Hiring pipelines are automated. Résumés are filtered by algorithms before a human ever sees them. Entry-level roles now demand experience that used to be learned on the job. Networking happens on platforms that didn’t exist five years ago. Even the definition of “a good job” has shifted and remote work, contract roles, portfolio careers, and geographic arbitrage have all changed the calculus.
Old people: put yourself back in your own shoes at 20. Remember how you felt when someone much older told you stories about nickel-priced gas and single-income households, or how laborers and managers “weren’t that far apart.” You probably rolled your eyes and thought, That’s not how things work anymore.
You were right then.
And young people are right now.
The world you grew up in is gone. The ladder you climbed has been reconfigured, partially dismantled, and in some places replaced entirely. The least we can do is acknowledge that and make room for the people who actually know how the new system works.
Sometimes the most helpful advice isn’t telling someone what to do. It’s admitting that you no longer know, and pointing them to someone who does.
