21 ms·

I Joined Airbnb at 52, Here’s What I Learned About Age, Wisdom, and Tech Industry

228 points by miraj 9y ago

ChuckMcM 9y ago
Here you go, the secret to relevance throughout your career: "I’ve spent a lifetime being curious about people and things, which, I guess, means I’m well-read and well connected." In my own experience being naturally curious has led me down interesting paths to meet interesting people and learn amazing things. As a parent I tried (and apparently succeeded) in nurturing the natural curiosity in my children, never shutting down a legitimate[1] 'why' question with a curt answer. If you have forgotten how to be curious it can be hard to rekindle but I think it is more a habit than a permanent change to one's brain. If you practice I like to believe it is possible to rehabilitate curiosity (even if I don't have any research to back that up.) [1] It helps to distinguish the difference between when your child doesn't understand the answer and when they simply don't like the answer. And the best way to do that is to toss it back to them as "What part of the answer didn't make sense to you?"
- lj3 9y ago
  Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    Ah, the cargo-culting of logical fallacies
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      I think things work differently at the C-suite level. This guy was never a developer. He was a founder and CEO with a successful exit. He was hired as a former founder and CEO, by a business working in the same space in which he was a founder and CEO. It's an interesting story, but unfortunately its relevance to the career trajectory of the average tech old-timer is somewhere close to zero.
      - Mz 9y ago
        Given how jobs seem to be dying, self employment may be the wave of the future. It was also something the founders of the U.S. thought was critical as a foundation for a truly free and empowered society. I think this is correct. When I had a corporate job, I worried a lot that they would trip across my online activities and fire me for them for some damn reason. It seriously curtailed my online activities for a time. I think you see a high correlation between being a founder and having really strong opinions because these people can afford their opinions, both literally and figuratively. They don't have to live in fear that their opinions might leave them unable to provide for themselves and their families. If the takeaway is "If you want his confidence, then become an entrepreneur," I am very okay with that. There is zero reason we can't create a country of lots of small businesses and consultants. The reality is small businesses provide more jobs and job growth in the U.S. than megacorps do anyway.
        ianai 9y ago
        There's a problem, of course. The economy has centuries of history of filtering out all competition and leading to monopolies/monopolistic competition. There are significant pressures in the 'free' economy toward centralization of power. Those pressures include over half of the US political landscape. Small business can't save itself let alone the rest of us.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - lexap 9y ago
        This.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    If there are so many people falling through modern society's cracks, then let us figure out how to have them be able to guide themselves to others in similar fashion to help them influence a better solution into being?
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    That is always possible. I suppose to be really scientific about it I should got through my LinkedIn connections (which I generally curate to only people who I have actually worked with in one way or another) and put beside their name my impression on whether or not I felt they embraced their curiosity, and then to go through all of their profiles, for the ones that were current, and rank their status as unwillingly retired, under employed, employed at scale, or willingly retired. Then go back and see what correlation there was between that and what I had evaluated their natural curiosity level to be. And thinking through that thought exercise it makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft has tried to do that sort of analysis of the data set. You might be able to proxy curiosity by looking at how many different kinds of jobs people take or how many different skills they accrue.
    - kcorbitt 9y ago
      I think a lot of us younger engineers would love to see the results of that type of analysis, as biased and incomplete as it inevitably would be. My career planning will be significantly different under the assumption "as long as I feed my curiosity and stay up to date, I have a reasonable expectation of continuing a primarily technical career until retirement age" vs "it's vital that I've built up some non-technical core competencies by the age of 40, because I may need to depend on them to drive my career at that point."
      - elmerland 9y ago
        I would say that non-technical competencies are not optional and they will help your career one way or another. Maybe a better question to ask ourselves is how do I continue to add value in the environment I'm in? I doubt the answer to that remains constant throughout a long career.
        wiz21z 9y ago
        It all depends on what you mean by "value". If value means helping the marketing team at apple to sell more useless (but admitedly super-technological) phones, then count me out :-)
  - jerf 9y ago
    You can say this may be survivorship bias. But I at least haven't seen the data that says this is survivorship bias. I haven't seen really solid numbers about how unemployed software engineers are at 50. All I've got are vague and anecdotally-substantiated allegations of age bias in Silicon Valley, which may be localized in the startup arena, and also Silicon Valley is not the entire industry.
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      I saw lots of people commenting about it on job sites in many places that arent Silicon Valley. Others had to train their young or H1-B replacements as their last duty. There's definitely more data out there than Silicon Valley complaints.
      - ianai 9y ago
        Their voices are also being silenced by conditions imposed for unemployment/etc.
  - md2be 9y ago
    Those of us born in after 1965 are not baby boomers. We are gen x. I don't buy that there much different between gen x and gen y
    - kleer001 9y ago
      Almost all generational names are bs. Maybe the swath of children born directly after WW2. Other than that it's just noise. Another good thing to ignore is decade based commentary. We haven't seen it much since the 1990's because 2000's and 10's are a bit cumbersome. But believe me once we hit 2020 it's going to be on like Donkey Kong and won't let up until 2100 with "Are you a 20s girl?" and "10 things to look forward to with the 20s" and on and on.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Note that the author isn't an engineer; he's the ex-CEO of a hotel company. One believes the situations to be somewhat different.
    - lexap 9y ago
      Yeah, hello? This is the most atypical model possible for older tech workers. A hugely successful hospitality CEO joins a tech startup disrupting the global hospitality industry. How is that experience instructive for anyone except Chip Conley? Emotional intelligence in Mr. Conley's world apparently doesn't require any sense of irony. How hospitable.
      - mch82 9y ago
        My typical co-workers have always been 20-30 years older. The ones that stand out and have been the most productive teaming across generations have taken Chip's approach. The older engineers that focus on "how to technically implement a feature" miss out on (and often suffocate) the potential creativity of younger engineers.
      - mixmastamyk 9y ago
        Indeed, and a known author.
    - mch82 9y ago
      There's often lot of technology and industrial engineering in what we tend to think of as "low tech" industries. An engineering professor once claimed a pie company had been the most high tech place he'd consulted.
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    It depends on what they're curious about. An incurious person who only learns new stuff when it's forced on them will eventually lose relevance. Their knowledge base is literally defined in terms of their environment and the forces that it exerts on them. They are like coastal rock formations shaped over the years by the tides- they don't shape themselves, they are shaped. A more curious older engineer with a wider skillset and knowledge of current technologies is going to have an easier time getting a job than one with a very specific and perhaps less current skillset. I mean, it's not a guarantee, there are lots of other factors that contribute to one's employability (interpersonal skills, for example). But it just seems obvious that someone with more skills (and more current skills) is going to be more employable than someone with fewer skills, and perhaps less up-to-date skills.
    - lj3 9y ago
      > An incurious person who only learns new stuff when it's forced on them will eventually lose relevance. There's always one of these comments when this topic comes up. It's simply not true. There are lots of people still working Cobol jobs out there and there's lots of demand for more. C# hasn't changed much in decades. Neither has C++. The only part of tech that moves at breakneck pace is web development and serious engineers consider that to be a cruel joke. And that's coming from a senior web developer with 15 years of web dev experience.
      - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
        > C# hasn't changed much in decades. Neither has C++. Having done C++ back in the days before the STL & Boost were a thing and having done C# back in the C# 2/.NET 2.0 era and recently trying to come back up to speed on C# 6 and .NET 4.6.x, I have to say that that is an ... incredibly surprising assertion to make.
      - mwfunk 9y ago
        I'm no advocate of rapid change for its own sake. I mostly do POSIX systems programming, and the churn of web development frameworks does not appeal to me at all. However, I still want to at least aspire to learn new stuff and stay informed about what other people in my field are doing. Every technology has an expiration date, and as I get older and more ensconced at work, I've been getting paranoid about getting too comfortable. Specifically, I'm paranoid that I know relatively little about web development, period. I am not some twentysomething hipster web guy, I'm a weird middle-aged Unix guy. Although I've rarely pushed myself to learn about something because I felt like I had to- I'm just interested in software and have always enjoyed learning about it. I don't have to force myself to do it, and I probably wouldn't be productive if I did. The only thing that really matters is doing whatever makes you happy. If it has pragmatic side effects, great, but if it doesn't make you happy then it's not worth doing.
alain94040 9y ago
I think this is great advice regardless of your age: > I asked a lot of "why" and "what if" questions, forsaking the "what" and "how" questions on which most senior leaders focus
- ericclemmons 9y ago
  I've struggled with helping people out of this rut. On the tech side, people come to me with solutions they want to see live, and spend 10x the time there than describing the root problem. Equally important is asking "why not" to alternative scenarios, as it fleshed out the scope of the root problem, often vetting the initial solution or finding a better one.
- nunez 9y ago
  +1. Usually the real answers are hidden behind the "whys", hence why a Five Whys exercise can sometimes be really effective.
  - ferentchak 9y ago
    They also avoid the 'who' which creates a culture of CYA and secrets.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Maybe it's just my delivery, but in many contexts I've found people who react to "why" questions as confrontational. So much so that of the 6 W's [sic] I think "why" is the line of inquiry most requiring of diplomacy.
  - ViViDboarder 9y ago
    That's a great point. I think it's very much dependant on the audience as well as delivery. One would hope that people you work with are receptive to curiousity, however it's not a given. In those cases I tend to give a little bit of background as to why I want to know why. It helps show the person that you trust them, but you're curious anyway. Eg. "I think I missed some of the prior meetings on this, why is this the best option?" It adds a little bit of humility that prevents it from sounding confrontational. Sometimes I'll ask something that gets to the bottom of why without asking it directly. Asking "Did we test the other options before choosing this one?" Can help someone to elaborate their why and making yourself an active participant rather than listener only.
dlevine 9y ago
It's interesting to see this sort of perspective. I would like to see more of it. I'm not 52, but I'm in my late 30s and as an engineer who works at startups, I find myself unable/uninterested in doing the things I did in the past. For example, I find myself having to work smarter rather than just putting in more hours than everyone else (which is what I did in my 20s). It's also important to bring my perspective from 15+ years in the industry while at the same time coming into each job with a fresh set of eyes (he touches on this in the article). Just because I've seen a lot doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot to learn.
- pcurve 9y ago
  I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smarter and willing to put in more hours.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    > not wanting to work longer hours As others have pointed out, working longer hours is actually counterproductive. The 40 hour work week and paid vacations were not introduced out of kindness, they were introduced because employers found out that they actually improved overall productivity. However, particularly in highly cognitively demanding fields, even 40 hours is likely too much, actual productive work is more around 20-25h per week at best. If you try to do more, you will accomplish less. > eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. Yes. If you continue to do the same things in the same way, you will definitely be uncompetitive. As you grow and grow older, you should be accumulating at least knowledge and hopefully a little bit of wisdom. As the old joke goes: "One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999." Meaning you have to find ways to leverage your hopefully increasing abilities to shift into jobs/roles where you provide more value. Like bringing architectural oversight to teams/projects, mentoring, answering questions. If I can prevent a more junior developer from spending a day or two chasing down a blind alley by giving a couple of minutes of advice, that's pretty valuable. And scalable, because I can give a few minutes of advice to a whole bunch of developers over a given workday. Or if I manage to introduce an architecture that reduces code by say 50% while at the same time making the code simpler, I've just doubled the team's productivity, with likely more compounded savings in the future.
paulcole 9y ago
>And yet we workers “of a certain age” are less like a carton of milk and more like a bottle of fine wine What a classically "Baby Boomer" statement. Confusing age with wisdom. Yeah as a white male boomer you grew up in an insanely prosperous era with basically everything stacked in your favor. Like if you'd didn't come out of that on top, WTF was wrong with you? Edit: Now that I've finished reading, this also stands out: >Wisdom is about pattern recognition. And the older you are, the more patterns you’ve seen. LOL, coming from an older person, this seems awfully convenient.
danderino 9y ago
"Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them. I’m not saying young people don’t understand emotions. Our digital world is full of emojis, and the term “emo” didn’t exist back in my schoolyard days. But emojis don’t create interpersonal, face-to-face fluency." I am really tired of statements like these.
- MattyMc 9y ago
  Did you read this on your iPhone? :) Just kidding; I'm tired of hearing these things too.
- angersock 9y ago
  > I am really tired of statements like these. Sure, but is it wrong?
  - danderino 9y ago
    Yes I think so. Even if it isn't, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that its actually true. The bit about emojis in particular however seems completely out of touch.
- raarts 9y ago
  I found that I became much more proficient in reading people as I grew older but this has nothing to do with technology.
skmurphy 9y ago
This was the best take-away for me: I also learned that my best tactic was to reconceive my bewilderment as curiosity, and give free rein to it. I asked a lot of “why” and “what if” questions, forsaking the “what” and “how” questions on which most senior leaders focus. [...] My beginner’s mind helped us see our blind spots a little better, as it was free of expert habits. We think of “why” and “what if” as little kid questions, but they don’t have to be.
- place1 9y ago
  I often try to ask 'why' and 'what if' questions. Maybe I just suck at talking to people but they often become defensive and think i'm trying to question their solutions when i'm really trying to understand how their solution works (i'm young).
kstenerud 9y ago
I'm 42 now, still highly employable, although not at all companies. And that's fine. They want someone who can churn out cheap but perhaps not so good code, more power to them. That's not what I'm interested in, anyway. But I know what I'm worth. I know that my code is top notch. I know that my standards are above most things out there, and it shows. I've released almost half a million lines of code for free as open source projects. I've gotten emails from people in the most remarkable industries, asking questions about something I'd written decades ago (for example, http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/system/network/daemons/ringconnectd.lsm http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/system/network/daemons/...). I've posted the more useful of them to my github account, and that's the first place potential employers look to see if I'm worth my fee. And I am. Age only becomes a problem if you stop drilling down into the technologies people use and REALLY understand them, and what lies underneath. Otherwise you really aren't worth any more than the guys coming out of college with no experience.
- theparanoid 9y ago
  Half of us are average coders. I'd still like a job at 50. This isn't an issue in other professions. Doctors don't become stale with age. Lawyers typically become partners.
- beokop 9y ago
  That you write "top notch code" isn't really a selling point for most organizations. Management tends to just want to get things done ASAP. Now, if you're in a field that REQUIRES well written code (mission critical systems etc.) then being able to do so is of course a merit. But using good coding skills as an argument for higher salary at your average tech company just doesn't make sense.
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Good coding is not just code but design as well, and has a huge effect on outcomes even if many business people don't appreciate that. Some do however, and I believe the niche is much bigger than "just NASA."
dlwdlw 9y ago
This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers) It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher level skills or slowly fade into irrelevance as your ideological baggage acts as an achor distancing you from keeping pace with the now constant supply of young grads. (Now that coding is "cool") At the very very abstract level, companies are divided into people seeking meaning and those that provide it. Upper level executives provide meaning in work for the ICs. For the middle level executives they provide meaning in the "company". As you age, you're expected to be more wise and knowledgeable. Staying as an IC is a black mark of sorts that you've plateaued at some point. You either need to move into a meaning providing (or meaning enforcing) role, or stay as an IC but provide meaning in the form of technical wisdom. Otherwise, all else being equal, you stand out amongst the younger workforce. Previous rewarding specialization does not mean future rewarding specialization. The world can shift in a way so that your skills and ideologies and perspectives are useless. The ageism prevalent in silicon valley is that it's unkind to equally skilled low level people with one lerson being older. If your an older person and your skills are actually in great demand but low suppl(strategy and meaning making)y, the ageism doesn't apply.
- neves 9y ago
  What is IC?
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Individual contributor, as in not a manager.
  - jdcarr 9y ago
    Individual Contributor
    - kpil 9y ago
      Ah, the strange impenetrable language of corporate America.
cyberferret 9y ago
One thing that people don't seem to talk about is that with age, usually comes a broad network of colleagues and people that you know in an industry. Never underestimate the power of a network. A 50 year old engineer sitting alone in a remote location on the other side of the world is going to find employment and opportunities much harder to come by than a 50 year old engineer who has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for decades. (Ask me how I know... ;-) ) Just the power of a warm referral, or someone in a meeting to say "Oh, I know so-and-so is really great with database security - I worked with him about 10 years ago...We should get him on board for this project..." can work wonders for a career.
tracker1 9y ago
Constant curiosity and learning are two of the things I love about software development... Most people gain and hone knowledge and experience in a particular sector or industry, and usually not very broad. With software development you hone your own craft, with a breadth of knowledge, experience, tools and techniques. You will be exposed to project management knowledge and techniques as well. But beyond all of this, in a career you will have the ability to work with any number of industries and areas of business. From eLearning materials for aircraft engines to business security in banking. It's an incredible opportunity. The one thing I have learned, is I'm not very interested in pursuing traditional management roles... I've dipped my toes in and hated it. But being able to work with some amazing people, be challenged by very opposing views and ideas and the opportunity to constantly learn from all angles is incredible. The work itself is often rather mundane, but what you get out of it isn't just the process of making something work.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Chip has his own wikipedia page....I think he may be an outlier. It isn't like he is joining airbnb as a Sr developer...
jypepin 9y ago
Reminds me a little of the movie "the internship". That's a good story.
bitterolddev 9y ago
This guy is both non-technical--which I correctly assumed, given that his essay was published in the HBR--as well as a former executive. His life experience is of little relevance to the average 40-something (or is it 30-something, now?) software engineer stifled by ageism.

228 points by miraj 9y ago

Here you go, the secret to relevance throughout your career: "I’ve spent a lifetime being curious about people and things, which, I guess, means I’m well-read and well connected." In my own experience being naturally curious has led me down interesting paths to meet interesting people and learn amazing things. As a parent I tried (and apparently succeeded) in nurturing the natural curiosity in my children, never shutting down a legitimate[1] 'why' question with a curt answer. If you have forgotten how to be curious it can be hard to rekindle but I think it is more a habit than a permanent change to one's brain. If you practice I like to believe it is possible to rehabilitate curiosity (even if I don't have any research to back that up.) [1] It helps to distinguish the difference between when your child doesn't understand the answer and when they simply don't like the answer. And the best way to do that is to toss it back to them as "What part of the answer didn't make sense to you?"

lj3 9y ago
Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Ah, the cargo-culting of logical fallacies
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    I think things work differently at the C-suite level. This guy was never a developer. He was a founder and CEO with a successful exit. He was hired as a former founder and CEO, by a business working in the same space in which he was a founder and CEO. It's an interesting story, but unfortunately its relevance to the career trajectory of the average tech old-timer is somewhere close to zero.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Given how jobs seem to be dying, self employment may be the wave of the future. It was also something the founders of the U.S. thought was critical as a foundation for a truly free and empowered society. I think this is correct. When I had a corporate job, I worried a lot that they would trip across my online activities and fire me for them for some damn reason. It seriously curtailed my online activities for a time. I think you see a high correlation between being a founder and having really strong opinions because these people can afford their opinions, both literally and figuratively. They don't have to live in fear that their opinions might leave them unable to provide for themselves and their families. If the takeaway is "If you want his confidence, then become an entrepreneur," I am very okay with that. There is zero reason we can't create a country of lots of small businesses and consultants. The reality is small businesses provide more jobs and job growth in the U.S. than megacorps do anyway.
      - ianai 9y ago
        There's a problem, of course. The economy has centuries of history of filtering out all competition and leading to monopolies/monopolistic competition. There are significant pressures in the 'free' economy toward centralization of power. Those pressures include over half of the US political landscape. Small business can't save itself let alone the rest of us.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - lexap 9y ago
      This.
- inetknght 9y ago
  If there are so many people falling through modern society's cracks, then let us figure out how to have them be able to guide themselves to others in similar fashion to help them influence a better solution into being?
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  That is always possible. I suppose to be really scientific about it I should got through my LinkedIn connections (which I generally curate to only people who I have actually worked with in one way or another) and put beside their name my impression on whether or not I felt they embraced their curiosity, and then to go through all of their profiles, for the ones that were current, and rank their status as unwillingly retired, under employed, employed at scale, or willingly retired. Then go back and see what correlation there was between that and what I had evaluated their natural curiosity level to be. And thinking through that thought exercise it makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft has tried to do that sort of analysis of the data set. You might be able to proxy curiosity by looking at how many different kinds of jobs people take or how many different skills they accrue.
  - kcorbitt 9y ago
    I think a lot of us younger engineers would love to see the results of that type of analysis, as biased and incomplete as it inevitably would be. My career planning will be significantly different under the assumption "as long as I feed my curiosity and stay up to date, I have a reasonable expectation of continuing a primarily technical career until retirement age" vs "it's vital that I've built up some non-technical core competencies by the age of 40, because I may need to depend on them to drive my career at that point."
    - elmerland 9y ago
      I would say that non-technical competencies are not optional and they will help your career one way or another. Maybe a better question to ask ourselves is how do I continue to add value in the environment I'm in? I doubt the answer to that remains constant throughout a long career.
      - wiz21z 9y ago
        It all depends on what you mean by "value". If value means helping the marketing team at apple to sell more useless (but admitedly super-technological) phones, then count me out :-)
- jerf 9y ago
  You can say this may be survivorship bias. But I at least haven't seen the data that says this is survivorship bias. I haven't seen really solid numbers about how unemployed software engineers are at 50. All I've got are vague and anecdotally-substantiated allegations of age bias in Silicon Valley, which may be localized in the startup arena, and also Silicon Valley is not the entire industry.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    I saw lots of people commenting about it on job sites in many places that arent Silicon Valley. Others had to train their young or H1-B replacements as their last duty. There's definitely more data out there than Silicon Valley complaints.
    - ianai 9y ago
      Their voices are also being silenced by conditions imposed for unemployment/etc.
- md2be 9y ago
  Those of us born in after 1965 are not baby boomers. We are gen x. I don't buy that there much different between gen x and gen y
  - kleer001 9y ago
    Almost all generational names are bs. Maybe the swath of children born directly after WW2. Other than that it's just noise. Another good thing to ignore is decade based commentary. We haven't seen it much since the 1990's because 2000's and 10's are a bit cumbersome. But believe me once we hit 2020 it's going to be on like Donkey Kong and won't let up until 2100 with "Are you a 20s girl?" and "10 things to look forward to with the 20s" and on and on.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Note that the author isn't an engineer; he's the ex-CEO of a hotel company. One believes the situations to be somewhat different.
  - lexap 9y ago
    Yeah, hello? This is the most atypical model possible for older tech workers. A hugely successful hospitality CEO joins a tech startup disrupting the global hospitality industry. How is that experience instructive for anyone except Chip Conley? Emotional intelligence in Mr. Conley's world apparently doesn't require any sense of irony. How hospitable.
    - mch82 9y ago
      My typical co-workers have always been 20-30 years older. The ones that stand out and have been the most productive teaming across generations have taken Chip's approach. The older engineers that focus on "how to technically implement a feature" miss out on (and often suffocate) the potential creativity of younger engineers.
    - mixmastamyk 9y ago
      Indeed, and a known author.
  - mch82 9y ago
    There's often lot of technology and industrial engineering in what we tend to think of as "low tech" industries. An engineering professor once claimed a pie company had been the most high tech place he'd consulted.
- mwfunk 9y ago
  It depends on what they're curious about. An incurious person who only learns new stuff when it's forced on them will eventually lose relevance. Their knowledge base is literally defined in terms of their environment and the forces that it exerts on them. They are like coastal rock formations shaped over the years by the tides- they don't shape themselves, they are shaped. A more curious older engineer with a wider skillset and knowledge of current technologies is going to have an easier time getting a job than one with a very specific and perhaps less current skillset. I mean, it's not a guarantee, there are lots of other factors that contribute to one's employability (interpersonal skills, for example). But it just seems obvious that someone with more skills (and more current skills) is going to be more employable than someone with fewer skills, and perhaps less up-to-date skills.
  - lj3 9y ago
    > An incurious person who only learns new stuff when it's forced on them will eventually lose relevance. There's always one of these comments when this topic comes up. It's simply not true. There are lots of people still working Cobol jobs out there and there's lots of demand for more. C# hasn't changed much in decades. Neither has C++. The only part of tech that moves at breakneck pace is web development and serious engineers consider that to be a cruel joke. And that's coming from a senior web developer with 15 years of web dev experience.
    - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
      > C# hasn't changed much in decades. Neither has C++. Having done C++ back in the days before the STL & Boost were a thing and having done C# back in the C# 2/.NET 2.0 era and recently trying to come back up to speed on C# 6 and .NET 4.6.x, I have to say that that is an ... incredibly surprising assertion to make.
    - mwfunk 9y ago
      I'm no advocate of rapid change for its own sake. I mostly do POSIX systems programming, and the churn of web development frameworks does not appeal to me at all. However, I still want to at least aspire to learn new stuff and stay informed about what other people in my field are doing. Every technology has an expiration date, and as I get older and more ensconced at work, I've been getting paranoid about getting too comfortable. Specifically, I'm paranoid that I know relatively little about web development, period. I am not some twentysomething hipster web guy, I'm a weird middle-aged Unix guy. Although I've rarely pushed myself to learn about something because I felt like I had to- I'm just interested in software and have always enjoyed learning about it. I don't have to force myself to do it, and I probably wouldn't be productive if I did. The only thing that really matters is doing whatever makes you happy. If it has pragmatic side effects, great, but if it doesn't make you happy then it's not worth doing.

alain94040 9y ago

I think this is great advice regardless of your age: > I asked a lot of "why" and "what if" questions, forsaking the "what" and "how" questions on which most senior leaders focus

ericclemmons 9y ago
I've struggled with helping people out of this rut. On the tech side, people come to me with solutions they want to see live, and spend 10x the time there than describing the root problem. Equally important is asking "why not" to alternative scenarios, as it fleshed out the scope of the root problem, often vetting the initial solution or finding a better one.
nunez 9y ago
+1. Usually the real answers are hidden behind the "whys", hence why a Five Whys exercise can sometimes be really effective.
- ferentchak 9y ago
  They also avoid the 'who' which creates a culture of CYA and secrets.
rhizome 9y ago
Maybe it's just my delivery, but in many contexts I've found people who react to "why" questions as confrontational. So much so that of the 6 W's [sic] I think "why" is the line of inquiry most requiring of diplomacy.
- ViViDboarder 9y ago
  That's a great point. I think it's very much dependant on the audience as well as delivery. One would hope that people you work with are receptive to curiousity, however it's not a given. In those cases I tend to give a little bit of background as to why I want to know why. It helps show the person that you trust them, but you're curious anyway. Eg. "I think I missed some of the prior meetings on this, why is this the best option?" It adds a little bit of humility that prevents it from sounding confrontational. Sometimes I'll ask something that gets to the bottom of why without asking it directly. Asking "Did we test the other options before choosing this one?" Can help someone to elaborate their why and making yourself an active participant rather than listener only.

dlevine 9y ago

It's interesting to see this sort of perspective. I would like to see more of it. I'm not 52, but I'm in my late 30s and as an engineer who works at startups, I find myself unable/uninterested in doing the things I did in the past. For example, I find myself having to work smarter rather than just putting in more hours than everyone else (which is what I did in my 20s). It's also important to bring my perspective from 15+ years in the industry while at the same time coming into each job with a fresh set of eyes (he touches on this in the article). Just because I've seen a lot doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot to learn.

pcurve 9y ago
I'm in your same age bucket, and when I hear comments like "work smarter rather than just putting in more hours", I wonder if that's not just rationalization for simply not wanting to work longer hours because people in that age group generally have other life obligations, and eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. You can't always work smarter day in day out, and expect to beat someone who is both smarter and willing to put in more hours.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > not wanting to work longer hours As others have pointed out, working longer hours is actually counterproductive. The 40 hour work week and paid vacations were not introduced out of kindness, they were introduced because employers found out that they actually improved overall productivity. However, particularly in highly cognitively demanding fields, even 40 hours is likely too much, actual productive work is more around 20-25h per week at best. If you try to do more, you will accomplish less. > eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status. Yes. If you continue to do the same things in the same way, you will definitely be uncompetitive. As you grow and grow older, you should be accumulating at least knowledge and hopefully a little bit of wisdom. As the old joke goes: "One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999." Meaning you have to find ways to leverage your hopefully increasing abilities to shift into jobs/roles where you provide more value. Like bringing architectural oversight to teams/projects, mentoring, answering questions. If I can prevent a more junior developer from spending a day or two chasing down a blind alley by giving a couple of minutes of advice, that's pretty valuable. And scalable, because I can give a few minutes of advice to a whole bunch of developers over a given workday. Or if I manage to introduce an architecture that reduces code by say 50% while at the same time making the code simpler, I've just doubled the team's productivity, with likely more compounded savings in the future.

paulcole 9y ago

>And yet we workers “of a certain age” are less like a carton of milk and more like a bottle of fine wine What a classically "Baby Boomer" statement. Confusing age with wisdom. Yeah as a white male boomer you grew up in an insanely prosperous era with basically everything stacked in your favor. Like if you'd didn't come out of that on top, WTF was wrong with you? Edit: Now that I've finished reading, this also stands out: >Wisdom is about pattern recognition. And the older you are, the more patterns you’ve seen. LOL, coming from an older person, this seems awfully convenient.

danderino 9y ago

"Many young people can read the face of their iPhone better than the face of the person sitting next to them. I’m not saying young people don’t understand emotions. Our digital world is full of emojis, and the term “emo” didn’t exist back in my schoolyard days. But emojis don’t create interpersonal, face-to-face fluency." I am really tired of statements like these.

MattyMc 9y ago
Did you read this on your iPhone? :) Just kidding; I'm tired of hearing these things too.
angersock 9y ago
> I am really tired of statements like these. Sure, but is it wrong?
- danderino 9y ago
  Yes I think so. Even if it isn't, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that its actually true. The bit about emojis in particular however seems completely out of touch.
raarts 9y ago
I found that I became much more proficient in reading people as I grew older but this has nothing to do with technology.

skmurphy 9y ago

This was the best take-away for me: I also learned that my best tactic was to reconceive my bewilderment as curiosity, and give free rein to it. I asked a lot of “why” and “what if” questions, forsaking the “what” and “how” questions on which most senior leaders focus. [...] My beginner’s mind helped us see our blind spots a little better, as it was free of expert habits. We think of “why” and “what if” as little kid questions, but they don’t have to be.

place1 9y ago
I often try to ask 'why' and 'what if' questions. Maybe I just suck at talking to people but they often become defensive and think i'm trying to question their solutions when i'm really trying to understand how their solution works (i'm young).

kstenerud 9y ago

I'm 42 now, still highly employable, although not at all companies. And that's fine. They want someone who can churn out cheap but perhaps not so good code, more power to them. That's not what I'm interested in, anyway. But I know what I'm worth. I know that my code is top notch. I know that my standards are above most things out there, and it shows. I've released almost half a million lines of code for free as open source projects. I've gotten emails from people in the most remarkable industries, asking questions about something I'd written decades ago (for example, http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/system/network/daemons/ringconnectd.lsm http://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/sunsite/system/network/daemons/...). I've posted the more useful of them to my github account, and that's the first place potential employers look to see if I'm worth my fee. And I am. Age only becomes a problem if you stop drilling down into the technologies people use and REALLY understand them, and what lies underneath. Otherwise you really aren't worth any more than the guys coming out of college with no experience.

theparanoid 9y ago
Half of us are average coders. I'd still like a job at 50. This isn't an issue in other professions. Doctors don't become stale with age. Lawyers typically become partners.
beokop 9y ago
That you write "top notch code" isn't really a selling point for most organizations. Management tends to just want to get things done ASAP. Now, if you're in a field that REQUIRES well written code (mission critical systems etc.) then being able to do so is of course a merit. But using good coding skills as an argument for higher salary at your average tech company just doesn't make sense.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Good coding is not just code but design as well, and has a huge effect on outcomes even if many business people don't appreciate that. Some do however, and I believe the niche is much bigger than "just NASA."

dlwdlw 9y ago

This just feels irrelevant to me. Ageism is directed towards older individual contributors, not higher level executives whose job is mostly strategy. (And unofficially, providing meaning and perspective to the younger workers) It even seems to provide proof that being an older IC makes you irrelevant because the success story is not a coder. The lesson is that as you age it's either up or out. You either learn higher level skills or slowly fade into irrelevance as your ideological baggage acts as an achor distancing you from keeping pace with the now constant supply of young grads. (Now that coding is "cool") At the very very abstract level, companies are divided into people seeking meaning and those that provide it. Upper level executives provide meaning in work for the ICs. For the middle level executives they provide meaning in the "company". As you age, you're expected to be more wise and knowledgeable. Staying as an IC is a black mark of sorts that you've plateaued at some point. You either need to move into a meaning providing (or meaning enforcing) role, or stay as an IC but provide meaning in the form of technical wisdom. Otherwise, all else being equal, you stand out amongst the younger workforce. Previous rewarding specialization does not mean future rewarding specialization. The world can shift in a way so that your skills and ideologies and perspectives are useless. The ageism prevalent in silicon valley is that it's unkind to equally skilled low level people with one lerson being older. If your an older person and your skills are actually in great demand but low suppl(strategy and meaning making)y, the ageism doesn't apply.

neves 9y ago
What is IC?
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Individual contributor, as in not a manager.
- jdcarr 9y ago
  Individual Contributor
  - kpil 9y ago
    Ah, the strange impenetrable language of corporate America.

cyberferret 9y ago

One thing that people don't seem to talk about is that with age, usually comes a broad network of colleagues and people that you know in an industry. Never underestimate the power of a network. A 50 year old engineer sitting alone in a remote location on the other side of the world is going to find employment and opportunities much harder to come by than a 50 year old engineer who has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for decades. (Ask me how I know... ;-) ) Just the power of a warm referral, or someone in a meeting to say "Oh, I know so-and-so is really great with database security - I worked with him about 10 years ago...We should get him on board for this project..." can work wonders for a career.

tracker1 9y ago

Constant curiosity and learning are two of the things I love about software development... Most people gain and hone knowledge and experience in a particular sector or industry, and usually not very broad. With software development you hone your own craft, with a breadth of knowledge, experience, tools and techniques. You will be exposed to project management knowledge and techniques as well. But beyond all of this, in a career you will have the ability to work with any number of industries and areas of business. From eLearning materials for aircraft engines to business security in banking. It's an incredible opportunity. The one thing I have learned, is I'm not very interested in pursuing traditional management roles... I've dipped my toes in and hated it. But being able to work with some amazing people, be challenged by very opposing views and ideas and the opportunity to constantly learn from all angles is incredible. The work itself is often rather mundane, but what you get out of it isn't just the process of making something work.

oh_sigh 9y ago

Chip has his own wikipedia page....I think he may be an outlier. It isn't like he is joining airbnb as a Sr developer...

jypepin 9y ago

Reminds me a little of the movie "the internship". That's a good story.

bitterolddev 9y ago

This guy is both non-technical--which I correctly assumed, given that his essay was published in the HBR--as well as a former executive. His life experience is of little relevance to the average 40-something (or is it 30-something, now?) software engineer stifled by ageism.