7 ms·

Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees

298 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

havaloc 9mo ago
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy. I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
- expedition32 9mo ago
  The danger is turning into a gerontocracy.
  - inglor_cz 9mo ago
    Given the plummeting birth rates, that may be inevitable.
- dredmorbius 9mo ago
  Apparently Luke Kaiser is the originator of that form, though there are antecedents: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/04/age-treachery/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/04/age-treachery/>
dangus 9mo ago
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it. I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.” But really, you’re just making everyone less productive. I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate. 9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
- lumirth 9mo ago
  There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind. For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated. Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed). This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
  - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
    In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
  - tombert 9mo ago
    People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things. I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough. But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1] Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer. I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result. [1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.
ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago
Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge
- t-writescode 9mo ago
  While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that: - it exists (and will always exist) - knowing it is *vital* - maintaining ways of spreading it is *also* vital
  - notyourwork 9mo ago
    I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all. It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff. That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
- chii 9mo ago
  > Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
  - general1465 9mo ago
    You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.
rr808 9mo ago
I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
- chii 9mo ago
  Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
- tgpc 9mo ago
  not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-( as you say, cutthroat
- kyralis 9mo ago
  There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time. Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
- cal_dent 9mo ago
  The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
  - felixg3 9mo ago
    There’s a name for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- 9mo ago
stego-tech 9mo ago
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default. Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower. Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form. As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it. Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennials-careers-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...
- leosanchez 9mo ago
  > Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default. What is the alternative ?
  - burnt-resistor 9mo ago
    You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously. There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
    - sejje 9mo ago
      The disappearing middle class in America is becoming the upper class.
  - Brybry 9mo ago
    A little over 100 years ago women were only 20% of the labor force. [1] Which is to say, most women did not participate in wage employment. Now they're ~47%. Which is great! But it also hints that society doesn't need most of the labor for the system to still function. [1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history
mixmastamyk 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010 Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  Works best, if you retain, but most companies aren’t willing to do that. They basically force you to leave, in order to make good money. Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security. Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset. There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.
tbrownaw 9mo ago
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are. Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
- mcmcmc 9mo ago
  Definitely smells like survivorship bias. The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research. They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
  - saidnooneever 9mo ago
    ugh that they have to phrase it in such a way already makes me nauseous. why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it. i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT. you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out. even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao. sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.
siliconc0w 9mo ago
Wisdom is a thing, the longer you spend in tech the more you realize that most engineering work is probably a net negative.
- yoyohello13 9mo ago
  That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
  - jjav 9mo ago
    > More likely to talk back. Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members. I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
    - falloutx 9mo ago
      > tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently. Those are the best team members. those companies are rare. and most of the companies are still 100% top down with no talk back and everyone being a yes man.
      - jjav 9mo ago
        I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places. In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly. I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long. I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
  - 9mo ago
Animats 9mo ago
OK, boomer. The other side of this is old people desperately hanging onto jobs because they can't afford to retire. So slots are not opening up for young people.
- rusk 9mo ago
  Yet another side is arrogant little babies coming on board and making a big steaming mess of things because they thought they could do things better. Waaaaahhhhhhhh
  - altacc 9mo ago
    Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.
- klipklop 9mo ago
  People have to work to survive and afford medical treatment in the US. It’s funny how you can blame the people forced to work to survive and not the system that is setup to force them to do so. The elite post covid have placed the average worker firmly under their boot. They apply more pressure each day.
Muromec 9mo ago
I work in a place where we have (former) COBOL developers and the actual mainframe. One co-worker worked here for 25 years until they retired last year (does it sounds like trade union propaganda already?). We also have a lot of 20 years old for whom it may be the first job. Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.
- RubberbandSoul 9mo ago
  These places do exist. They are very nice. For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.
  - Muromec 9mo ago
    The one I work at is publicly traded very much
- pjc50 9mo ago
  Both my previous and current employer have some long-serving staff. One was incredibly effective because he effectively carried the entire oral history of the software system; it would have been a massive loss if he'd ever quit for some reason. Not even a union position, just has to be a "normal" company doing the normal thing of selling a product and/or service to customers rather than a stockmarket rocketship or a consultancy bodyshop.
keyle 9mo ago
I haven't upvoted a story so fast in ages! j/k In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto. I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic. They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire. So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim. Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.
- RubberbandSoul 9mo ago
  It's easy to get bitter about these things. "Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less". You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc. Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way. But they want solutions, not advice or opinions. I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it. Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems. Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
simianwords 9mo ago
I liked the article not because I think older people work better but it’s good for society to normalise working when you are old. Giving a safe, inclusive place where old people can still be productive and feel like they matter is important. I think the article is correct in that older people can still be productive even at 60+ and it’s a pity that we let them retire. Retiring is not the most healthy option for people!
svilen_dobrev 9mo ago
yeah. Long-experienced people (not just plain-old) have grown that feeling called "warm fuzzies" [1]. And although warm-fuzzies are not in the spec, mostly, it is what makes or breaks good product/service. anyone hiring such? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028 [1] https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftwareFables_-M.Meier-1993.html https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftware... (a copy because it's gone from web)
BiteCode_dev 9mo ago
- Young people to innovate and grow - Old people to stabilise and ensure sustainability Fire one group and you get problems on the long run. The hard part is to keep the balance between each group's influence. They don't have the same needs, desires, agendas, and flaws.
- chanux 9mo ago
  It's almost like rusty'ol wisdom and youthful energy are actually a good combination to have!
chanux 9mo ago
I Appreciate the sentiment and yet in spirit of balance: "Science moves forward one funeral at a time" - Max Planck
AIorNot 9mo ago
WTH is this article on about? I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old.. I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’ It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche
known 9mo ago
"Experience is the name men gave to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde (b. 1854)
casey2 9mo ago
Interestingly there is no statistical correlation between worker performance and experience. Maybe the poor lighting is holding them back?
- officialchicken 9mo ago
  Except, there is correlation. You're holding the statistics wrong - the chart you're looking at is upside-down.
mahrain 9mo ago
With the age of retirement (in europe) steadily increasing, and the workforce getting older, the typical corporate position of rejecting older candidates will need to change, if only simply to fill the vacancies. For this, the mentality of hiring managers and HR will need to change as well, and business school articles like this should help.
falloutx 9mo ago
I am 30 and I feel like I get discriminated by age already. Hiring teams are still mostly made up of new grads (<5y exp) who work for cheap and this hasnt changed since 2 decades ago.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
expedition32 9mo ago
Can't help but feel this sounds like coping. When your country doesn't have a pension system, people don't save for retirement and politicians want to interfere with social care you get the infamous "Walmart door greater".
carlosjobim 9mo ago
I'll explain the reasoning for why companies are reluctant to hire old people: You can teach things to an unexperienced person, but you cannot unteach an experienced person. What experience an older person has greatly varies, and this experience could be very useful or useless, depending on what the person has done in life. Unfortunately there is one experience/wisdom which almost all people learn with age, and that is being a knave. Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately. People seem to think that they have to fight the younger generations with deceit and manipulation. And employers aren't too keen to deal with such persons. But things might also be changing. The people aging right now are of a higher quality than the current generation of old. Also, many times your best employees will be old people. But they're harder to find.
- anarticle 9mo ago
  “Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately.” Not really sure where this fortune cookie came from, but in the age of faked resumes, credentials, and AI interview assistants (personally seen this, they’re not even good liars lol), I think we can agree that we’re at best equivalent in degeneracy. What are your favorite old people deceits? The ai interview assistant crutch is hilarious because people using it think interviewers can’t tell. It really shows when they are bad speakers. If you train the skill of speaking you’d be much better at getting away with it. Maybe to the point you wouldn’t need it, but that’s their call.
  - carlosjobim 9mo ago
    > What are your favorite old people deceits? The favourite has to be "I'm leaving all this inheritance to you when I die, so you'd better obey me!". You're only leaving an inheritance because you can't bring anything with you when you die. If you could, you wouldn't leave a dime. But in a business / hiring setting, old people are more shrewd and have learnt to put their own interests first at every point. Ie, colleagues cannot count on camaraderie and employers cannot count on loyalty. Young employees usually haven't been screwed over or betrayed in life yet, so they don't carry that burden of having to find a way to "get even" by screwing other people over.
rxw0lf 9mo ago
Because while these new grads and less experienced people maybe quite intelligent, in general they are less capable of dealing with or managing anything properly. I am 54 I go back and forth between an IC and director level management at will. As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation. As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish. Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.
LorenPechtel 9mo ago
The article has both positives and negatives--what I think is going on is both factors are relevant, just to varying degrees in different situations.
mancerayder 9mo ago
Is Leetcode a way to help weed out older folks? Older folks who have worked in infrastructure (devops/sre where btrees algos mean jack shit) or management (where you haven't coded in a few years)?
- johsole 9mo ago
  For me (40s) my Leetcode skills have gotten noticeably worse over time even though I'm a much better IC than I was. I'm sure I could improve my skills by practicing but I have a family and other responsibilities. I think Leetcode does weed out older folks, not necessarily because of skill, but because of the time needed for practice.
xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago
When I first started at Big Saas Co i was 42 and most of engineering ICs were late 20s early 30s. The founder, who was at least 65, came over to me and asked how old I was. When I replied 42 he muttered "you're too old" and walked off. Welcome to big SAAS! Funny thing is I got the job because of my experience with CSS. All the young kids couldn't center a div as the saying goes.
Suppafly 9mo ago
Ask someone starting to get a little older myself, I'm pretty sure these articles are just copium no matter how much I want to believe them. It's like how the suit stores try to tell us that every year is the year of the suit. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it happen.

298 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy. I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!

expedition32 9mo ago
The danger is turning into a gerontocracy.
- inglor_cz 9mo ago
  Given the plummeting birth rates, that may be inevitable.
dredmorbius 9mo ago
Apparently Luke Kaiser is the originator of that form, though there are antecedents: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/04/age-treachery/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/06/04/age-treachery/>

dangus 9mo ago

The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it. I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.” But really, you’re just making everyone less productive. I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate. 9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.

lumirth 9mo ago
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind. For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated. Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed). This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
- tombert 9mo ago
  People really underestimate how even small amounts of friction can discourage you from doing things. I started using Typst instead of Pandoc Markdown->LaTeX->PDF recently. I had a reluctance to change because I didn't really see the point, it looked like Markdown, and who cares if Typst compiles faster, how much time is really spent compiling? I had a watch script set up to start recompiling on a change and it worked well enough. But eventually I decided to give it a try, and it sort of changed my entire perspective. Large LaTeX compilations could take upwards a minute, which doesn't sound that long, but similar documents could compile in milliseconds, from scratch, and it also supports incremental compilation. It was categorically faster and it wasn't really any harder than Markdown and if you use the Latin Modern font it doesn't look significantly different than LaTeX. [1] Suddenly I found myself experimenting with and tuning my formatting way more than I did with LaTeX. I make my documents look nicer, make sure that the spacing look nicer, have better-placed page breaks, move text around more frequently to make my writing flow a bit nicer and better. I keep Evince open to the right, tmux with Neovim and `typst watch` on the left and my changes automatically load instantly, and as such I end up making my documents nicer. I still use LaTeX for stuff that has a lot of math formatting, but for everything else I use Typst and I find myself doing a lot more as a result. [1] Before you say "Use MS Word or LibreOffice", yeah you're not necessarily wrong but I really hate "hidden formatting" that you get with rich text. Also I almost never like the way that documents end up looking with MS Word.

ThrowawayTestr 9mo ago

Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_knowledge

t-writescode 9mo ago
While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that: - it exists (and will always exist) - knowing it is *vital* - maintaining ways of spreading it is *also* vital
- notyourwork 9mo ago
  I didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all. It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff. That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.
chii 9mo ago
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
- general1465 9mo ago
  You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.

rr808 9mo ago

I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.

chii 9mo ago
Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
tgpc 9mo ago
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-( as you say, cutthroat
kyralis 9mo ago
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time. Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
cal_dent 9mo ago
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
- felixg3 9mo ago
  There’s a name for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
9mo ago

stego-tech 9mo ago

Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default. Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower. Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form. As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it. Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennials-careers-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...

leosanchez 9mo ago
> Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default. What is the alternative ?
- burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  You appear to be asking a trick question, disingenuously. There's a vast continuum between grossly-unequal homeless everywhere like many corrupt, third-world countries with masked, paramilitary disappearance squads and a large, happy middle-class paid well that can afford to buy things, take vacations, and enjoy life where corruption is lesser.
  - sejje 9mo ago
    The disappearing middle class in America is becoming the upper class.
- Brybry 9mo ago
  A little over 100 years ago women were only 20% of the labor force. [1] Which is to say, most women did not participate in wage employment. Now they're ~47%. Which is great! But it also hints that society doesn't need most of the labor for the system to still function. [1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history

mixmastamyk 9mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010 Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
Works best, if you retain, but most companies aren’t willing to do that. They basically force you to leave, in order to make good money. Being older is just part of the formula. Being good is another part, and having a good relationship with the company and coworkers, is just as important. That comes from longevity in the job, and also, a sense of security. Companies love to have workers that are constantly afraid they’ll lose their jobs. That doesn’t really encourage a productive, quality-focused mindset. There’s a lot of negative stuff, said about older employees. Maybe some of it is true, but I suspect that a lot of it, is an inevitable response to years of being treated like shit.

tbrownaw 9mo ago

This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are. Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).

mcmcmc 9mo ago
Definitely smells like survivorship bias. The title is clickbait. This reads more like marketing copy for the author’s consulting firm than any serious research. They “help forward-thinking leaders and organisations see aging not as decline, but as a driver of innovation, resilience, and growth.”
- saidnooneever 9mo ago
  ugh that they have to phrase it in such a way already makes me nauseous. why start with the 'not as a decline, but as'. its such a stupid way to put it. i cant beleive marketing ppl still dont realize that you dont sell something by say 'oh its not actually a turd its delicious'. JUST SAY ITS DELICIOUS. NO ONE WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS NOT. you dont want to put a bad flavor in someones mouth and then try to wash it out. even LLM get this basic shit wrong lmao. sorry a bit unrelated but considering the specific topic this tagline is suppose to address its really triggering.

siliconc0w 9mo ago

Wisdom is a thing, the longer you spend in tech the more you realize that most engineering work is probably a net negative.

yoyohello13 9mo ago
That’s why they traditionally want to get rid of older people. More likely to talk back. You hire a fresh batch of 20 year olds and their shut up and do what you tell them.
- jjav 9mo ago
  > More likely to talk back. Yes, that's great. Push back, tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently (with reasons and data, of course). Those are the best team members. I currently manage an engineering team and all my team members are awesome, but the older ones are better at being informedly opinionated, which is very important.
  - falloutx 9mo ago
    > tell me why I'm wrong or why we should do it differently. Those are the best team members. those companies are rare. and most of the companies are still 100% top down with no talk back and everyone being a yes man.
    - jjav 9mo ago
      I don't know how rare they are overall, but you can make them rare for yourself by quitting such places. In over 30 years of career, I'd say I've spent a total of about 2.25 years (between 3 companies) in roles where I wasn't allowed to do my job and was, instead, expected to just listen. In each case, I left pretty quickly. I'm an expert, if you hire me it is so you will delegate the decision making of my areas of ownership to me. Otherwise why am I here? If there is no good answer to that, then I won't be there long. I don't recommend staying in any job where you don't own any decision making.
- 9mo ago

Animats 9mo ago

OK, boomer. The other side of this is old people desperately hanging onto jobs because they can't afford to retire. So slots are not opening up for young people.

rusk 9mo ago
Yet another side is arrogant little babies coming on board and making a big steaming mess of things because they thought they could do things better. Waaaaahhhhhhhh
- altacc 9mo ago
  Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.
klipklop 9mo ago
People have to work to survive and afford medical treatment in the US. It’s funny how you can blame the people forced to work to survive and not the system that is setup to force them to do so. The elite post covid have placed the average worker firmly under their boot. They apply more pressure each day.

Muromec 9mo ago

I work in a place where we have (former) COBOL developers and the actual mainframe. One co-worker worked here for 25 years until they retired last year (does it sounds like trade union propaganda already?). We also have a lot of 20 years old for whom it may be the first job. Somehow it's consistently no drama and no nonsense place. Compared to the frat house atmosphere of the usual tech startup, it's really different.

RubberbandSoul 9mo ago
These places do exist. They are very nice. For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.
- Muromec 9mo ago
  The one I work at is publicly traded very much
pjc50 9mo ago
Both my previous and current employer have some long-serving staff. One was incredibly effective because he effectively carried the entire oral history of the software system; it would have been a massive loss if he'd ever quit for some reason. Not even a union position, just has to be a "normal" company doing the normal thing of selling a product and/or service to customers rather than a stockmarket rocketship or a consultancy bodyshop.

keyle 9mo ago

I haven't upvoted a story so fast in ages! j/k In 2022, I interviewed with a company... in crypto. I was the oldest in the company by a decade at least. They kept telling me they wanted experience. I have plenty, of experience. I was cautiously optimistic. They eventually failed me on a test of reactJS. The funniest part was when I asked for feedback, the reason they gave me, were showing poor engineering technique on their end; a lack of understanding of what makes it down the wire. So they wanted experience, but not the experience that prevents them from making mistakes of their own; not an experience that threatened their views. I realised this later. Young rock-star developers want experienced people around them, maybe, but they want to be free to reinvent the wheel on a whim. Now when I interview some place and I eerily feel old, I just bow out respectfully. No point wasting everyone's time.

RubberbandSoul 9mo ago
It's easy to get bitter about these things. "Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less". You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc. Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way. But they want solutions, not advice or opinions. I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it. Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems. Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.

simianwords 9mo ago

I liked the article not because I think older people work better but it’s good for society to normalise working when you are old. Giving a safe, inclusive place where old people can still be productive and feel like they matter is important. I think the article is correct in that older people can still be productive even at 60+ and it’s a pity that we let them retire. Retiring is not the most healthy option for people!

svilen_dobrev 9mo ago

yeah. Long-experienced people (not just plain-old) have grown that feeling called "warm fuzzies" [1]. And although warm-fuzzies are not in the spec, mostly, it is what makes or breaks good product/service. anyone hiring such? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873028 [1] https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftwareFables_-M.Meier-1993.html https://en.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftware... (a copy because it's gone from web)

BiteCode_dev 9mo ago

- Young people to innovate and grow - Old people to stabilise and ensure sustainability Fire one group and you get problems on the long run. The hard part is to keep the balance between each group's influence. They don't have the same needs, desires, agendas, and flaws.

chanux 9mo ago
It's almost like rusty'ol wisdom and youthful energy are actually a good combination to have!

chanux 9mo ago

I Appreciate the sentiment and yet in spirit of balance: "Science moves forward one funeral at a time" - Max Planck

AIorNot 9mo ago

WTH is this article on about? I just went to a tech social event last week here in Seattle and there were so may older men and women desperately looking for new positions after having been brutally cut by Microsoft and Amazon Also the calculus that older employees cost companies more in salary and benefits is usually ruthlessly applied In the tech / startup world I have to lie about my age or hide it as an over 50 year old.. I mean you don’t see any AI commercials with gray haired people do you Ageism and Sexism is rampant in tech - not to mention the practice or hiring folks of one age , sex and ethnicity or another as culture ‘fit’ It sucks because so many older tech experts with years of good experience have been thrown by the wayside.. to the point where its a cliche

known 9mo ago

"Experience is the name men gave to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde (b. 1854)

casey2 9mo ago

Interestingly there is no statistical correlation between worker performance and experience. Maybe the poor lighting is holding them back?

officialchicken 9mo ago
Except, there is correlation. You're holding the statistics wrong - the chart you're looking at is upside-down.

mahrain 9mo ago

With the age of retirement (in europe) steadily increasing, and the workforce getting older, the typical corporate position of rejecting older candidates will need to change, if only simply to fill the vacancies. For this, the mentality of hiring managers and HR will need to change as well, and business school articles like this should help.

falloutx 9mo ago

I am 30 and I feel like I get discriminated by age already. Hiring teams are still mostly made up of new grads (<5y exp) who work for cheap and this hasnt changed since 2 decades ago.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

expedition32 9mo ago

Can't help but feel this sounds like coping. When your country doesn't have a pension system, people don't save for retirement and politicians want to interfere with social care you get the infamous "Walmart door greater".

carlosjobim 9mo ago

I'll explain the reasoning for why companies are reluctant to hire old people: You can teach things to an unexperienced person, but you cannot unteach an experienced person. What experience an older person has greatly varies, and this experience could be very useful or useless, depending on what the person has done in life. Unfortunately there is one experience/wisdom which almost all people learn with age, and that is being a knave. Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately. People seem to think that they have to fight the younger generations with deceit and manipulation. And employers aren't too keen to deal with such persons. But things might also be changing. The people aging right now are of a higher quality than the current generation of old. Also, many times your best employees will be old people. But they're harder to find.

anarticle 9mo ago
“Just as our bodies and our minds generally deteriorate with age, so does the soul and the moral fibre - unfortunately.” Not really sure where this fortune cookie came from, but in the age of faked resumes, credentials, and AI interview assistants (personally seen this, they’re not even good liars lol), I think we can agree that we’re at best equivalent in degeneracy. What are your favorite old people deceits? The ai interview assistant crutch is hilarious because people using it think interviewers can’t tell. It really shows when they are bad speakers. If you train the skill of speaking you’d be much better at getting away with it. Maybe to the point you wouldn’t need it, but that’s their call.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  > What are your favorite old people deceits? The favourite has to be "I'm leaving all this inheritance to you when I die, so you'd better obey me!". You're only leaving an inheritance because you can't bring anything with you when you die. If you could, you wouldn't leave a dime. But in a business / hiring setting, old people are more shrewd and have learnt to put their own interests first at every point. Ie, colleagues cannot count on camaraderie and employers cannot count on loyalty. Young employees usually haven't been screwed over or betrayed in life yet, so they don't carry that burden of having to find a way to "get even" by screwing other people over.

rxw0lf 9mo ago

Because while these new grads and less experienced people maybe quite intelligent, in general they are less capable of dealing with or managing anything properly. I am 54 I go back and forth between an IC and director level management at will. As an IC, all of my designs just simply work without any drama. What happens in this scenario is that as soon as they learn what they needed to learn from me I am usually out. Also there seems to be some concept of drama and running around like a chicken with your head cut off is "fun" and I am a buzz kill in this situation. As a manager I spend a lot of my time just making sure that everybody is set up for success as nobody seems to be able to advocate for themselves. Their communication is lacking they don't understand their audience or how to delegate. In these roles I am retained as long as I wish. Smart doesn't equal knowledgeable and smart doesn't equal efficient. It's that simple. These are things best taught through experience.

LorenPechtel 9mo ago

The article has both positives and negatives--what I think is going on is both factors are relevant, just to varying degrees in different situations.

mancerayder 9mo ago

Is Leetcode a way to help weed out older folks? Older folks who have worked in infrastructure (devops/sre where btrees algos mean jack shit) or management (where you haven't coded in a few years)?

johsole 9mo ago
For me (40s) my Leetcode skills have gotten noticeably worse over time even though I'm a much better IC than I was. I'm sure I could improve my skills by practicing but I have a family and other responsibilities. I think Leetcode does weed out older folks, not necessarily because of skill, but because of the time needed for practice.

xXSLAYERXx 9mo ago

When I first started at Big Saas Co i was 42 and most of engineering ICs were late 20s early 30s. The founder, who was at least 65, came over to me and asked how old I was. When I replied 42 he muttered "you're too old" and walked off. Welcome to big SAAS! Funny thing is I got the job because of my experience with CSS. All the young kids couldn't center a div as the saying goes.

Suppafly 9mo ago

Ask someone starting to get a little older myself, I'm pretty sure these articles are just copium no matter how much I want to believe them. It's like how the suit stores try to tell us that every year is the year of the suit. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it happen.