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First, productivity (as in widgets per hour) is a bad measure for knowledge worker value. It's famously hard to measure the output of teams of engineers over lo

First, productivity (as in widgets per hour) is a bad measure for knowledge worker value. It's famously hard to measure the output of teams of engineers over long periods of time, let alone the recent output of a single engineer. Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional coaches? Third, it's also taken as a given that we can fairly cut the wages of individuals based on... what? Again, we're bad at measuring performance. Are we assuming they're less productive because they're older? How is that OK? It's possible that a 50 year old has become better at relevant things in the last year, surely.

roenxi 8y ago
> Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional coaches? Software engineers in particular. Computers really started to stabilise in the 2003 when single core clock speeds hit a wall. 'Rapid' change since then looks a bit glacial compared to what rapid meant in the 90s. I don't have anything to back it up, but I'm pretty suspicious that a lot of specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important. I know lawyers were in existence in ~500BC and the law famously changes slowly. Doctors, coaches, etc are in a similar boat where the situation now is basically the same as when they were 10 years old. No such similarities in software, the languages, bottlenecks, opportunities and best-practice mindset (in many areas) has changed. It makes sense why software engineers under the age of 30 would have an edge. If hardware continues to plateau (moderate if, given graphics cards) then the current generation will not have the same problem when they are 50. ASIDE: I always wonder if it is really a coincidence that Apple started making inroads at the exact second that being able to quickly incorporate new parts stopped being an exponential advantage.
- oblio 8y ago
  A reasonably curious Computer Science graduate that stays up to date a bit with current technologies will be as effective at 50 as your average 50 year old lawyer. You just need to check your underlying assumptions (aka axioms) once every 5 years or so. But core CS is as the name says, science. It doesn't change every 1-2 years. Knuth wrote about searching and sorting back in the 60s, neural network (pardon me, machine learning) first appeared in the 80s :)
  - stagger87 8y ago
    NNs and ML go back a few decades earlier than the 80s :)
    - oblio 8y ago
      My bad, I couldn't remember how old they were and was too lazy to dig for the exact year. They're pre-web technology, anyway :p
- rboyd 8y ago
  I don't recall any "specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important". A bad algorithm then is still a bad algorithm today. OTOH the GPU and advances in ML have had a pretty dramatic effect on the landscape. So I don't think any stalled computer architecture is the cause. The biggest "edge" most engineers have in their 20s is an undue sense of loyalty to the corporation and the naivete to expect that sacrificing time and health will be proportionally rewarded. By your 30s you've typically seen the ugly truth and have a harder time spending 12 hour days driving somebody else's vision. Usually we see the older engineers claiming that they were either 1) more effective in every way since X years ago; or 2) slower in some ways but experience more than makes up for it.
xstartup 8y ago
1. Difficulty in assigning a single number to performance does not mean that you can't compare against others. 2. There is license requirement, taxi medallion like setup with lawyers, doctors which keeps overall supply low. 3. It's just not just your salary which company pays. There is a cost to company per employee if the ratio of your salary: cost to company declines, you are a problem for the company and company wants to invest in an employee with a better ratio. Also, you are making an assumption that we can look at an employee's productivity in isolation. No, there is a guy at our company. He is good at everything he does but no one wants to talk to him at a company due to his behavior issue. And whenever anyone finds a work which needs talking to him, they drag their feet, make excuses just to avoid him. Maybe older guys don't fit in the band of recent graduates? Maybe they feel that new guys are reinventing the wheel and dismiss the idea outright? Just imagine, if someone experienced (or old) (who has years of experience in payment processing) told Stripe founder that their idea is BS because they are tired of payment processing and have seen nothing new.
- yayana 8y ago
  Just imagine if someone experienced was retained at Intel told them that they are doing CPU level security wrong by doing downright idiotic things like sharing caches. What is the value of that worker in terms of productivity? Similarly with stripe, I am aware of dozens of similar companies doing CC processing that failed, and stripe probably built a better answer after sleeping on the advice of grumpy old advisors while companies that lost everything in recreating with nothing new had no advice or chose to ignore it. The general problem is that absurd hope may get you an IPO and a worse is better solution that experts can fix for you later. Building and maintaining a good company is hard and requires expensive experienced workers that lower your quarterly productivity by telling you the truth. Software being in the crisis it is in is no surprise, but the speed that hardware is joining the negligence for productivity club is more alarming.
danieltillett 8y ago
If employees don’t lose value as they age then why do employers want to get rid of them? It is not because they don’t like them. There is only one reason and that is they are not productive enough for their wage compared to someone younger. Just because it is hard to measure productivity doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. Most employers have a reasonable idea of the price/productivity of their employees. What we have done by not allowing the cutting of wages with age and declining productivity is introduce a lottery event. Some employees as they age “win” by getting pay rises every year until the retire, while other are thrown on the scrap heap early. Collectively the decline in productivity is reflected in average wages, but the human cost is very unevenly distributed. People in every profession decline as they age. You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. Job productivity is a story of rapid rise until a certain point, a plateau, and then decline; slow at first and then faster. I wish it was otherwise as I am now past the plateau :(
- microtherion 8y ago
  > You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. When I had gallbladder surgery a few years ago, it felt VERY reassuring to have a surgeon in his 50s who could cite a track record of hundreds or thousands such surgeries, with a minuscule complication rate. You do NOT want a surgeon fresh out of med school who hacked a GAN into a surplus Tesla industrial robot to perform the procedure, no matter how bleeding edge that would be.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Surgeons reach their peak in their late 40s and decline. If the level the surgeon got to was very high then they may well still be very good, if not as good as they were when younger. I do agree that you don't want to be one of a younger surgeons learning cases.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > People in every profession decline as they age. Supreme Court appointees aren't in their 20s. Neither are Premier League coaches. Same for granting tenure to university professors. And citing price/productivity is ignoring the points I made about productivity being both hard to measure with any accuracy and being a bad measure of value besides.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yorwba 8y ago
IF you never cut anyone's wage because there's no fair way to measure performance, then there's also no reason to give anyone a raise. But people do get raises, even when they might not deserve them. The more raises an employee has received, the more likely it is that some of them weren't justified. Without wage cuts, you end up with people who are overpaid because their productivity didn't increase with their pay, not because their productivity actually declined.

roenxi 8y ago

> Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional coaches? Software engineers in particular. Computers really started to stabilise in the 2003 when single core clock speeds hit a wall. 'Rapid' change since then looks a bit glacial compared to what rapid meant in the 90s. I don't have anything to back it up, but I'm pretty suspicious that a lot of specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important. I know lawyers were in existence in ~500BC and the law famously changes slowly. Doctors, coaches, etc are in a similar boat where the situation now is basically the same as when they were 10 years old. No such similarities in software, the languages, bottlenecks, opportunities and best-practice mindset (in many areas) has changed. It makes sense why software engineers under the age of 30 would have an edge. If hardware continues to plateau (moderate if, given graphics cards) then the current generation will not have the same problem when they are 50. ASIDE: I always wonder if it is really a coincidence that Apple started making inroads at the exact second that being able to quickly incorporate new parts stopped being an exponential advantage.

oblio 8y ago
A reasonably curious Computer Science graduate that stays up to date a bit with current technologies will be as effective at 50 as your average 50 year old lawyer. You just need to check your underlying assumptions (aka axioms) once every 5 years or so. But core CS is as the name says, science. It doesn't change every 1-2 years. Knuth wrote about searching and sorting back in the 60s, neural network (pardon me, machine learning) first appeared in the 80s :)
- stagger87 8y ago
  NNs and ML go back a few decades earlier than the 80s :)
  - oblio 8y ago
    My bad, I couldn't remember how old they were and was too lazy to dig for the exact year. They're pre-web technology, anyway :p
rboyd 8y ago
I don't recall any "specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important". A bad algorithm then is still a bad algorithm today. OTOH the GPU and advances in ML have had a pretty dramatic effect on the landscape. So I don't think any stalled computer architecture is the cause. The biggest "edge" most engineers have in their 20s is an undue sense of loyalty to the corporation and the naivete to expect that sacrificing time and health will be proportionally rewarded. By your 30s you've typically seen the ugly truth and have a harder time spending 12 hour days driving somebody else's vision. Usually we see the older engineers claiming that they were either 1) more effective in every way since X years ago; or 2) slower in some ways but experience more than makes up for it.

xstartup 8y ago

1. Difficulty in assigning a single number to performance does not mean that you can't compare against others. 2. There is license requirement, taxi medallion like setup with lawyers, doctors which keeps overall supply low. 3. It's just not just your salary which company pays. There is a cost to company per employee if the ratio of your salary: cost to company declines, you are a problem for the company and company wants to invest in an employee with a better ratio. Also, you are making an assumption that we can look at an employee's productivity in isolation. No, there is a guy at our company. He is good at everything he does but no one wants to talk to him at a company due to his behavior issue. And whenever anyone finds a work which needs talking to him, they drag their feet, make excuses just to avoid him. Maybe older guys don't fit in the band of recent graduates? Maybe they feel that new guys are reinventing the wheel and dismiss the idea outright? Just imagine, if someone experienced (or old) (who has years of experience in payment processing) told Stripe founder that their idea is BS because they are tired of payment processing and have seen nothing new.

yayana 8y ago
Just imagine if someone experienced was retained at Intel told them that they are doing CPU level security wrong by doing downright idiotic things like sharing caches. What is the value of that worker in terms of productivity? Similarly with stripe, I am aware of dozens of similar companies doing CC processing that failed, and stripe probably built a better answer after sleeping on the advice of grumpy old advisors while companies that lost everything in recreating with nothing new had no advice or chose to ignore it. The general problem is that absurd hope may get you an IPO and a worse is better solution that experts can fix for you later. Building and maintaining a good company is hard and requires expensive experienced workers that lower your quarterly productivity by telling you the truth. Software being in the crisis it is in is no surprise, but the speed that hardware is joining the negligence for productivity club is more alarming.

danieltillett 8y ago

If employees don’t lose value as they age then why do employers want to get rid of them? It is not because they don’t like them. There is only one reason and that is they are not productive enough for their wage compared to someone younger. Just because it is hard to measure productivity doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. Most employers have a reasonable idea of the price/productivity of their employees. What we have done by not allowing the cutting of wages with age and declining productivity is introduce a lottery event. Some employees as they age “win” by getting pay rises every year until the retire, while other are thrown on the scrap heap early. Collectively the decline in productivity is reflected in average wages, but the human cost is very unevenly distributed. People in every profession decline as they age. You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. Job productivity is a story of rapid rise until a certain point, a plateau, and then decline; slow at first and then faster. I wish it was otherwise as I am now past the plateau :(

microtherion 8y ago
> You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. When I had gallbladder surgery a few years ago, it felt VERY reassuring to have a surgeon in his 50s who could cite a track record of hundreds or thousands such surgeries, with a minuscule complication rate. You do NOT want a surgeon fresh out of med school who hacked a GAN into a surplus Tesla industrial robot to perform the procedure, no matter how bleeding edge that would be.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  Surgeons reach their peak in their late 40s and decline. If the level the surgeon got to was very high then they may well still be very good, if not as good as they were when younger. I do agree that you don't want to be one of a younger surgeons learning cases.
humanrebar 8y ago
> People in every profession decline as they age. Supreme Court appointees aren't in their 20s. Neither are Premier League coaches. Same for granting tenure to university professors. And citing price/productivity is ignoring the points I made about productivity being both hard to measure with any accuracy and being a bad measure of value besides.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

yorwba 8y ago

IF you never cut anyone's wage because there's no fair way to measure performance, then there's also no reason to give anyone a raise. But people do get raises, even when they might not deserve them. The more raises an employee has received, the more likely it is that some of them weren't justified. Without wage cuts, you end up with people who are overpaid because their productivity didn't increase with their pay, not because their productivity actually declined.