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slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones on Solaris. Kubernet

by gaius 8y ago

slowly become less fluent in adopting new tech, and it shows For me, it's the exact opposite. Containers? Oh yeah, they're just like zones on Solaris. Kubernetes? Works like a VAXcluster. Cloud? Been there, done that, let's not make the same mistakes. ML? Well we used to call it predictive statistics, the only real difference now is we run it on GPU not CPU. I pick up "new" techs easily because I can step back and see the same patterns repeating. Experience is the killer app. Ageism is just another prejudice.

loup-vaillant 8y ago
Many people (possibly most) don't see the similarities between ostensibly different things. They just don't make the connection. I once had 2 different classes about stereo-vision (3D reconstruction with different view points). On the same year. One class was ostensibly about ecology. The other was ostensibly about computer vision. Only I noticed they taught the same thing, and everyone looked at me dumbstruck when I pointed this out. They didn't make the connection even when I made it for them. Learning ability does slow down with age. If you compensate with making connections with past experience, it doesn't translate to less ability to learn new tech. On the contrary, as you pointed out you learn them faster, because you already most of it. If however you fail to make the connection, you will feel that slow down.
matwood 8y ago
Same. At 40 years old, learning something 'new' is much easier now than when I was 20. First, there is not very much that comes out that is completely new and not built on existing foundational knowledge. Second, I can focus on the part that really is new, and not get tripped up on learning all of the foundational elements needed to understand said new thing. The OP mentioned not having time, but I've noticed as I've aged I have more discipline and thus more time.
mr_custard 8y ago
Same here. I've seen so many technologies at this point in my life, that picking up new ones is easy. It's simply a case of quickly grokking which variation (on an existing technological approach) the new technology is taking. There really aren't that many new groundbreaking ideas in tech; however, there's a lot of tribalism and silos (especially within individual programming language communities) which mean that old discoveries are often forgotten for a while until they are finally resurrected in a new guise.
romeisendcoming 8y ago
Nailed it with the last sentence.
rcarmo 8y ago
That bit on the VAX is... interesting. It's been a while, and it was a lot more about hard partitioning, but it makes sense.
- gaius 8y ago
  I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!

by gaius 8y ago

loup-vaillant 8y ago

Many people (possibly most) don't see the similarities between ostensibly different things. They just don't make the connection. I once had 2 different classes about stereo-vision (3D reconstruction with different view points). On the same year. One class was ostensibly about ecology. The other was ostensibly about computer vision. Only I noticed they taught the same thing, and everyone looked at me dumbstruck when I pointed this out. They didn't make the connection even when I made it for them. Learning ability does slow down with age. If you compensate with making connections with past experience, it doesn't translate to less ability to learn new tech. On the contrary, as you pointed out you learn them faster, because you already most of it. If however you fail to make the connection, you will feel that slow down.

matwood 8y ago

Same. At 40 years old, learning something 'new' is much easier now than when I was 20. First, there is not very much that comes out that is completely new and not built on existing foundational knowledge. Second, I can focus on the part that really is new, and not get tripped up on learning all of the foundational elements needed to understand said new thing. The OP mentioned not having time, but I've noticed as I've aged I have more discipline and thus more time.

mr_custard 8y ago

Same here. I've seen so many technologies at this point in my life, that picking up new ones is easy. It's simply a case of quickly grokking which variation (on an existing technological approach) the new technology is taking. There really aren't that many new groundbreaking ideas in tech; however, there's a lot of tribalism and silos (especially within individual programming language communities) which mean that old discoveries are often forgotten for a while until they are finally resurrected in a new guise.

romeisendcoming 8y ago

Nailed it with the last sentence.

rcarmo 8y ago

That bit on the VAX is... interesting. It's been a while, and it was a lot more about hard partitioning, but it makes sense.

gaius 8y ago
I see the parallels in the way jobs are scheduled on the cluster rather than an individual node, storage is common across the cluster, nodes and leave and join hot, the manageability of it all... all seems very familiar!