I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I made sure everyone knew they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.
You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.
There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I made sure everyone knew they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(
as you say, cutthroat
Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010
Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
Wisdom is a thing, the longer you spend in tech the more you realize that most engineering work is probably a net negative.
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
Definitely smells like survivorship bias.
The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research.
They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things.
I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough.
But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1]
Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer.
I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result.
[1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...
> Ageism is just a dick move in general.
It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.
> Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
What is the alternative ?
You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously.
There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
>Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
How does a society that allows not working function? How does it defend itself against attacking societies?
Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
> the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else.
It cuts both ways. It pays to listen when someone goes 'We tried that at my last workplace, here is what happened..'
I've been lucky enough to have a few examples of that in my career.
There are different kinds of tribal knowledge. Some is company-specific, some is role-specific or domain-specific.
It's not just the management.
Younger workers as well.
I speak from my own experience from both sides of the table, now of course at the receiving end of the under appreciation.
While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that:
I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.