This isn’t a complaint post. I genuinely enjoy working with people who have more experience than me — that’s the whole point. But there are dynamics to being 23 in an industry where the average age is considerably higher that are worth being honest about.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
The Part That’s Genuinely Hard
Your instincts get dismissed before they’re evaluated. Not by everyone, and not maliciously. But there’s a pattern where a more junior person raises something — a problem, a suggestion, a concern — and it gets a polite nod and then nothing happens. The same point raised six months later by someone with 15 years of experience gets taken seriously.
This is frustrating, but it’s also solvable. The solution isn’t to complain about it; it’s to build a track record that means your instincts get credit.
You don’t have the context that comes from experience. Sometimes the experienced people are right and you’re wrong, and the reason they’re right is they’ve seen this specific problem before and know how it ended. Learning to distinguish “I’m being dismissed” from “I don’t have the full picture yet” is genuinely difficult and takes time.
Social dynamics are weird. You’re not peers in the way people your own age are peers. Casual conversation has an asymmetry to it that takes some getting used to.
The Part That’s an Advantage
You’re current in a way people who learned things 15 years ago aren’t. This is real and it compounds over time. The people who’ve been in the industry for 20 years often have deep expertise in specific areas and shallow knowledge of things that emerged in the last few years. AI tooling is the obvious example right now. There’s genuine value in being the person who actually understands these tools rather than having a vague awareness of them.
You don’t have legacy habits. The “this is how we’ve always done it” problem is genuinely costly in IT teams. Being new enough to not have those habits, while also being technically capable, is a useful position to be in.
Energy and availability. You can put in the time to learn things. That’s not a permanent advantage — it’s a window of a few years where you can build a foundation that will matter for the rest of your career. Use it.
What Actually Works
Be right more often. The fastest way to get your instincts taken seriously is to demonstrate that they’re worth taking seriously. Document your work. When you spot something, write it up clearly. When you’re wrong, acknowledge it directly and without defensiveness. Build a track record.
Find the people worth learning from. In most organisations there are two or three people who are genuinely excellent. Find them. Ask them questions. The knowledge transfer that happens in informal conversations with senior people is worth more than any formal training.
Pick a specialisation early. Generalists are useful. Specialists with genuine depth are harder to replace. In security specifically, being the person who really understands one area — cloud security, SIEM operations, identity — is more valuable than being competent across everything.
Stop waiting to feel experienced. There’s no threshold you cross where you suddenly feel qualified. The people who look confident and authoritative felt exactly as uncertain when they were starting out. Act based on what you know, acknowledge the limits of what you know, and keep building.
The Honest Position
I’m still figuring this out. There are conversations I’d handle differently now than I did six months ago, and there will be things I’d change six months from now.
The advantage of writing this down is that the next person starting out doesn’t have to make the same discoveries from scratch.