Something that I have encountered recently from others is a belief that people that have been in technology for quite a while (e.g. "senior") require or at least may benefit from tutoring by younger people. While I am always open to learning from others I also believe that people in these fields should be keeping up with trends and general technology awareness on their own primarily because they are interested in the subject. If you are involved in software or systems in almost any capacity then you should be familiar with diverse areas such as social networking (and how these systems are implemented), application servers, NoSQL database architectures and mobile technology (iOS/Android). If are in a responsible position in technology and are not at least conversant in those areas the result will likely be that your approach and influence on systems design and implementation is very likely not going to include a fair evaluation of anything "new" and instead be the "same old thing". This will potentially cause your products to be more expensive, less maintainable and less extendable from those of your competitors. If you do not personally use mobile applications then your systems will probably not address the potential presented by them. I suppose that this is competition in the business world in general but it disappoints me when someone my age makes a comment like "we need the younger people to teach us about twitter". My response to that is that they should not have to.