Kids these days... No respect for their elders!

But yeah, spot on. That's exactly the specific issue I have with tech ageism, at least from the corporation's perspective.

I'm not saying that it's good to discriminate (on age or anything else), but from the dehumanizing RoI-oriented perspective of the corporation, it's just the dumb move to push the aging and the elderly on the side.

Why would you spend so many resources to bring a person to the top of the game, and then right when they start becoming really clever and useful, you start minding the color of their beard and render them obsolete?

It's like waiting for a green banana to become edible, and when it's at the perfect balance the one that's just right for you, you just pluck it and chuck it in the bin. WTF?

In any team I've worked, the guy with the gray temples has always been the most relaxed and significant contributor to any discussion - precisely thanks to the experience they developed over the past three and sometimes four decades.

Conversely, young upstarting devs who think they're interfacing with dinosaurs tend to not fare well.

That's probably because they lack the acumen to recognize golden egg-laying geese when they encounter them, and profit from the experience.

Yep. 59yo here. I've seen so many failed projects over the years that it's just second nature now to know early on when one is going to fail and why - both on the organizational and the technical side. The problem with all of this experience with failure, though, is that it gets harder and harder to get motivated. It's difficult to maintain a positive attitude about all of this because you know human nature and you remember that your younger self didn't exactly listen to your elders when they tried to help you avoid failure either.

The other 6 SIEMS no longer exist, I'm sure of it.

It gets harder to drum up the enthusiasm for Yet Another Security Appliance. They all have accounts, and roles, and reporting, and a little black box that does the magic trick...and they're all largely the same.

Keep my hope up though, there are smart kids out there, it is also human nature.

It's like a spectator sport.

The reverse is true, of course. ‘Expert beginners’ and those just looking to avoid any hard work or responsibility until they retire are equally as dangerous.

If you’re a non-technical business owner, manager or anyone else who relies on tech and the people who build and run it, it is completely impossible to choose wisely, as you simply don’t know who to believe.

I’ve got myself to positions of high trust in companies and then found my advice ignored both when I warn against:

1. Hiring those I can see are not just bad value but going to destroy tech and teams through arrogance and being given more responsibility than they should have (yet).

2. Leaving the dangerously incompetent ‘seniors’ and workshy in positions where they are either preventing any kind of growth or, worse, accelerating a death spiral which ends in either zero ability to compete or a tech disaster of some kind (lost or corrupted data, breach, etc.)

If you’re trusted, that doesn’t mean that your advice to spend some time building smaller teams of actually competent people - or whatever your proposal is, will be heeded. The smell of money over a short term (or lack of it) are usually going to win.

> You are a 10x engineer, capable of getting more done than others and in a fraction of the time.

I've learned some tact in my old age and no longer laugh when datetime formatting issues cause problems. I now act with empathy and gentle guidance.

But yes, "act with empathy and gentle guidance" is The Way.

Also, never name you previous versions foo.new and foo.old or you will end up with foo.old.old.no-really-old, and foo.new2

Preach on!

I've come to realize that Winston Churchill's joke "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else" applies to everything, not just democracy and capitalism. In tech, you either find the right solution and get ahead of the pack long enough to make some money, or you watch helplessly as the pack applies brute force to whatever problem you were trying to solve and succeeds the hard way. Stuff like video cards and DALL-E 2 come to mind. Visionary ideas bordering on magic succeed (delayed by decades) not due to the current "state of the art" in tech, but despite it. And that work is important, because exhaustively eliminating every other potential solution in the problem space represents the real work of solving problems. That's what an economy is (churn).

So I've been learning to let go, practice nonattachment, drop expectation in all forms, and just be grateful as we head towards the Singularity around 2040 and the decline of the natural world between 2050 and 2100 if people and AI working together can't save the planet. Being clever doesn't matter anymore, effort doesn't matter anymore, because someone somewhere will invent whatever idea you're working on, yesterday, and keep all of the money for themselves.

The greatest failure of our time is that tech not only can't deliver its own end-goal (UBI, freedom from forced labor, self-actualization for all people), it actively stands in its way by fostering wealth inequality. The only winning move is not to play.

I also think ageism is only part of the problem, it's stubbornness in general. Even if you're younger, it's difficult to translate hard-earned experience into respect because many engineers are infatuated with their own designs and algorithms. I've had people reject my advice even though I literally worked 2 years on app dedicated to solving that specific problem we were having. Of course they had egg on their face at the first demo. And they're still using that broken code.

A big part of ageism is our complete devaluation of "soft skills." And we treat anything beyond the limits of cranking out code as soft skills.

As for those of you who don't feel heard in work or life let me just say that that's no excuse not to try. Especially if it's of great importance. Even if you have to stick your neck out under a guillotine in order to say it. I imagine if that guy at NASA who discovered the fatal flaw in Challenger didn't stop at telling the NASA heads but maybe the news, the astronauts and even their families it could have been prevented.

I know that you are correct, that many younglings treat greybeards as people whose knowledge is obsolete.

I'm closing in on 40. I was first mesmerized by computers in 1993 when a shareware copy of Doom was popped into my 486 based PC. "What is this witchcraft!? I must uncover the secrets to how this works!". I've been hooked ever since. When I first started playing with friends over a dial up modem, I was intimidated by all the technical options, prompting me to select my baud rate etc... What does all these even mean? I felt like the people who were working on these computers were wizards full of deep deep knowledge and I was drinking from a fire hose, just trying desperately to catch up. 30 years later, I still feel like I'm trying to catch up!!! Many younglings might think greybeard knowledge is obsolete, but I don't and I still feel like I'm behind the curve, trying to catch up. I know this is probably tangential to imposter syndrome, but man.... I still admire and look up to the greybeards. Edit: Continuing to learn about the old, the origins, and the history is like exploring an abandoned mine shaft still filled with gold and jewels, and I still feel that childlike wonder with technology.

Note: Fabien Sanglard's Black Books are great technical deep dives.

[Edit: Spelling. Though, I liked the term "greybears"]

This meme is slowly dying, but let me do my part here to kick it along to death faster.

Nothing here is intended to offend per se, because I consider everything I say here to be the natural order of things, and there's nothing wrong with it. Still, it's the truth.

I'm in my mid-40s now. I've hired a lot of juniors over the years. Never once have I hired someone new and gone "Oh my god, they know so much, my job is at risk and I'm going obsolete!"

No, what happen when I hire junior is that I look at where they are now, and where they need to be to be a fully functional member of the team, and kind of sigh and make a plan to try to get them there as quickly as possible, plotting a minimal path through the thicket of things necessary to be a functioning software engineer nowadays. Six months is generally a bare minimum time line for this. Sometimes it's more.

And that's just to get to functional. A well-rounded engineer that I can plausibly just pass a project to and see them largely get it done correctly and without blowing their own or my foot off? Years. Years. And I just mean that from a technical perspective... it's yet more before I feel comfortable inserting them into the political layers.

Again, not intended to be offensive. Everyone has to pass through this phase. Every mature programmer should expect to be mentoring like this; if you're in your 40s and haven't had to do this at all, take a careful look at your career, something's probably wrong. (I don't mean management; I mean mentorship.)

There was one intern a few years ago who turned my head in that he had parity with me on a couple of interesting and unusual skills, but still... it was parity at best, not amazingly better than me. And while he had some amazing building skills for an intern I could see the skillset was still very, very lopsided and he needed a lot of work on the question of what to do, rather than just the doing of things. It's OK. That's normal. I'm not even sure how to hypothesize someone coming out of college with amazing skills in knowing exactly what to do. From what I see even when 20-year-old startup founders get this right it's a combination of mentorship from investors and sheer luck. I despair of even imagining how to teach this skill from anything other than experience, beyond simply sensitizing a student to the fact that it is something they should be looking at as they grow as an engineer.

There was a brief window in the 1990s where the industry underwent a technological convulsion and switched away from expensive mainframes to commodity computers and the internet/web. In that brief window, which I was lucky enough to capture and ride, a fresh young whelpling who had spent the last couple of months fiddling with this newfound "web" thing could do some things that the mainframe folks couldn't. There were still plenty of lessons that could have been learned from the mainframe folks, but for whatever reason, be in the internet just not being there yet, an unbridgeable cultural gap between the hacker mindset and the IBM mindset, whatever reason, the communication and wisdom transfer just didn't happen. That hasn't happened since then and I see no prospect of it happening in the next 10 years, not because the next 10 years won't see change but because the people like me of that era have already ridden any number of waves since then and adapted and I don't see that sort of convulsive surprise happening again.

The idea that someone in their 50s just has to be old and out of date is not just silly but downright ludicrous. Getting to "well rounded" in 2022 is something that will require you until your mid-30s minimum anymore.

I think a lot of the ageism that still lives in the industry are people who are unskilled and unaware. They can't even perceive what it is they are missing, so they are incapable of recognizing the skill gap. Since a lot of the ageism probably resides in people who aren't even engineers, managers, recruiters, people who are for any number of reasons good and bad simply incapable of interacting with engineers and being able to assess their skill levels, it's a plausible guess.

I have one kid in college an another going into her senior year of high school. Seems like very few their peers are going into computer science. I know it is not for every body, but it is surprising how unpopular it is.

There's a lot of great programmers coming up, but I often find their depth of knowledge to be limited. They can get to elegant solutions, but when it comes to how it fits into a larger distributed system architecture, security, scalability or long term maintainability they seem to start falling short. I've watched a lot of less experienced engineers want to just hit the "reset" button nonstop during an AWS outage, for hopes that resetting the system will clear up the problem and not intuiting the likely causes and consequences.

They simply need more time to expand out their layers of knowledge and experience. It will happen over time! I do feel that I was born of an era when many of the layers were more obvious to interact with and less abstracted. It is easy for a developer to get many years into their career and never interact with assembly these days - such was far less likely in the early 80's unless you wanted to only run slow BASIC programs forever.

It only pays off when you win the startup lottery and can cash out.

It's happening right now: the field is being flooded by data-kids who reason in different terms. They are statisticians first and programmers later. Their models can do stuff that bit-pushers like me will always struggle with. 10-15 years from now they'll run everything, and you won't be able to code a helloworld without specifying a ML model.

(In fact I've been generally unimpressed by the people I've seen so far. The ML math is complicated, but there's a whole lot of "just fire this at that without understanding why" in the actual practitioners. I've found I have a better understanding of what is and is not possible and why than they seem to rather often. This comes back to my extended education background, though; my training is old but less obsolete than you may think, a lot of modern ML stuff isn't some totally new thing just invented yesterday, but a couple of slight tweaks to established stuff that worked really well combined with finally having the CPU firepower to use it.)

__________________

[1] My standard reference for this is a guy called Geoff Hinton. Some people in machine learning may have heard the name. Quoting:

AMT: Ok, so you have been working on neural networks for decades but it has only exploded in its application potential in the last few years, why is that?

Geoffrey Hinton: I think it’s mainly because of the amount of computation and the amount of data now around but it’s also partly because there have been some technical improvements in the algorithms. Particularly in the algorithms for doing unsupervised learning where you’re not told what the right answer is but the main thing is the computation and the amount of data.

http://techjaw.com/2015/06/07/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning-...

[2] Check out the birth dates of the current generation of deep learning luminaries. Geoff Hinton: 1947. Yoshua Bengio: 1964. Yann LeCun: 1960. Jurgen Schmidhuber: 1963. It goes on. Go ahead and tell those guys they're greybeards who don't get what the kids today are doing.

I think the current ML world will have an overfitting reckoning. ML can optimize situations that are very normative, but struggles to create good solutions to situations in which the best outcomes are fairly distribute (but still specific best actions in certain scenarios).

ML cannot tell you what data or choices even matter in life, it can only help optimize those things once we've decided that. This is where age comes in as there's a correlation to, perhaps causal by, age on wisdom.

It seems like current ML (at least large-language models and transformers) will actually run out of publicly-accessible data to train on - the current models have scraped the majority of the useful text and image data on the public Internet, and it's not clear that we'll gain access to orders of magnitude more data, which according to the Chinchilla paper is the bottleneck on transformer performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32321522

;-)

(I'm 60. And you're right.)

It's possible you are assigning this sentiment yourself. I've always noticed a great deal of cultish nonsense in this industry. People promoting tools and techniques that have no reasoned basis and are often downright harmful. Where age comes into this is that as you become older you become more confident at identifying this BS and better at dismissing it. Played out in the context of a range of aged coworkers, this _looks_ like they think you are clueless because you are old. But a wise young person would have exactly the same attitude as you have. It's not that these folks are young, it's that they are unaware they're in a cult.

That's a great line.