Evem more challenging is interviewing with a potential new boss who is your junior in age and has fewer credentials and experience than you have.

I currently have a boss who is about 15 years younger than I am. Her age isn't really an issue. What's at issue is the fact that -- although I was hired for my unique technical expertise -- she won't really listen to a word I say. She's so busy "rebelling" against me as if I were her mother and she were my teenaged daughter, that anything I say is taken by her as a chance to "win" the upper hand.

I imagine her home life was very competitive, rather than collaborative, and that she spent a lot of time contradicting her parents. However, I get tired of her trying to "best" me all the time, trying to "prove" who is the boss when I'm trying to have a rational conversation with her based on facts, not emotion.

It is so exhausting that I'm very much looking forward to the end of this contract. I can't wait to move on. Why would you pay many thousands of dollars for a senior-level expert's advice on an area where you have NO technical parity, and then argue with everything they say? It's so immature and counter-productive.

I don't care if the expert you've hired is a brain surgeon or a tree surgeon -- if you have no respect for their expertise, let them go and move on. If you do have respect for them, listen attentively and thank them for their advice. Don't pick arguments with them constantly like a 15-year-old picking fights with her parents at the dinner table.

I just want to say to her, "I'm not your mother. Grow up."

Amen to your comment. I found myself working for a 24 year old (I'm 50) and what you're saying here is entirely true of immature and inexperienced bosses such as these. I was ready to string her up by her heels. She seemed to get some perverse little pleasure out of trying to boss someone old enough to be her parent, like maybe she was acting out some twisted little role play with her own mother. Believe me, it wasn't lost on me what this little freak was doing and for the first time in my long working career I found myself being insubordinate. It became a poison atmosphere with the 50-something year old Botox Queen who was over us both and twice as immature as her charge, constantly taking her side over mine. It's best to leave a warped situation like that behind you. I left with the resounding belief that there was nowhere to go but "up" and I was right.