Some Expertise Has a Shelf Life

A developer in his early 20s asked how I was managing work on this AI project. I started to explain. Somewhere in the middle of explaining, I caught myself about to say "back in the day, we'd have created a Jira ticket for this."

I stopped.

He's never worked in an enterprise. He has no mental model of Jira tickets, workflow transitions, or story points to update. There was nothing to bridge. He just wanted to know how we're doing it now – not the journey I took to get here.

I've spent a long time doing a particular kind of work: taking people from how they've been working to how they need to work next. Not just knowing the destination, but understanding what people are attached to, what makes a new way feel threatening, what story helps someone let go of what's familiar. Call it change-translation. It's a real skill, and I've put years into building it.

It doesn't work on someone who never learned the old way.

Here's the uncomfortable math. The people I work with are going to keep getting younger relative to me. The professional context I came up through keeps receding into history for them. Change-translation has an addressable audience – the people who share enough of my formation that they actually need that bridge – and that audience is quietly shrinking.

I sat with that for a few days.

There are two different things you can offer as someone with experience. One is the translation layer: "I've been where you are, I understand the pull of the old way, let me help you get to where you need to go." That's real value. It's also time-bounded in a way I hadn't fully reckoned with.

The other is demonstration. Not explaining that change is possible in the abstract – showing that you're doing it right now, in ways other people can actually observe. That ages differently.

The young developer doesn't need me to explain Jira. But there might be genuine value in watching someone in his 40s write instructions for an AI system, commit them directly to Git, and build real tools without an engineering background. Not the story of how I got here. The fact that I'm here.

The identity that lasts isn't "I've navigated a lot of change." It's "I'm navigating change right now, alongside you."

That's not a repositioning move. It's a practice.

I've always been comfortable in the position of the younger person – the one learning from people with more context, trying to show I could grow and adapt. I needed to demonstrate that I wasn't going to force my way of doing things on everyone, that I could take the journey they'd taken and honor it before I asked them to take a new one. That move made sense in that direction.

It doesn't translate cleanly in the other.

Working with people significantly younger than me requires something different. Not less skill – different skill. The question isn't "can I help you see why this new thing is better than what you've been doing?" It's "can I show up as someone who is genuinely adapting, in real time, in ways you can observe?" One is a story I tell. The other is a thing I do.

We're going to get older. That just is. Some things will get slower. Some things we absorbed quickly at 28 won't come as fast at 48. And the capabilities we built in one context – even the ones we're rightfully proud of – won't all translate forward at the same rate.

But some things compound. The ability to hold complexity without panicking. Pattern recognition across enough contexts to see what's actually happening when everyone else is still reacting. Knowing when to intervene and when the absence of your input is the best thing you can offer. Those hold – and they hold because they're actively practiced, not just stored somewhere from years ago.

The version of yourself that can stay relevant as the people around you keep getting younger? You don't become that person in the moment of crisis. You become them in the years before it.

Which is to say: right now.

I'm not sure this lands the same way for everyone. It might be a function of where I am specifically. But the question it left me with feels worth sitting with: what am I actually building, not just delivering? What capabilities am I developing today that will be visible and useful to someone who didn't grow up with the same professional context I did?

Less "how do I translate my past into present value" – more "what am I genuinely learning, and does it show?"

Worth thinking about.

Matthew