Comment by nnq

...fighting an overgeneralization with another overgeneralization - if one were to write a "starting flame wars guide for dummies" it should be the top of the bullet list :) (thankfully this is not a topic people start flamewars in)

"Maturity" is an ambiguous and contextual concept that doesn't usually mean anything - people should be rated by objective attributes like experience, productivity and so on. One could also say that a younger person with more and harsher life experience can be more "mature" than someone older and with kids (think someone who raised his/her little brothers by mistake after the parents got killed or something like that), but with less impacting experience but it would be just as meaningless because of the ambiguity of "maturity" (how much is life experience relevant to a programmer?). Raising children teaches one useful "life things", but so does starting a business, travelling around the world or working for the red cross in Africa. Adding insult to injury, managers tend to use "maturity" when referring to employees as "ability to take orders and act predictably even if not particularly creative" which basically makes it an "antiquality" for a small fast startup.