6 ms·

Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.

by lj3 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago
Ah, the cargo-culting of logical fallacies
- TheOtherHobbes 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lexap 10y ago
    This.
inetknght 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    Their voices are also being silenced by conditions imposed for unemployment/etc.
md2be 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
    Indeed, and a known author.
- mch82 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.

Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.

by lj3 10y ago

Survivorship bias. There are plenty of older engineers who are still quite curious on the unemployment line.

raverbashing 10y ago

Ah, the cargo-culting of logical fallacies

TheOtherHobbes 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lexap 10y ago
  This.

inetknght 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  Their voices are also being silenced by conditions imposed for unemployment/etc.

md2be 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y ago
  Indeed, and a known author.
mch82 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.