Marcus/Glen/Nick -
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html > Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may > contradict my opinion of myself." > > On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > > An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I > get more like myself." > > > > Keep fattening that tube, baby! > Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30. Reminds me of my own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust anyone over 30!". Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat" generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture. Well into my 40's I still felt relevant in virtually every work-context I found myself in. This was partly because I had managed to (moslty) keep up with the broad strokes of the technology and culture of science/computing/internet. I was regularly outshined by the occasional genius/polymath/young-turk, but not entirely eclipsed. I remember acutely when at about 45, one of my (slightly) older colleagues referred to me as one of the "as yet disproven" employees in the group I was working in. I had moved from a Big-Iron (HPC) computing division to a more nimble and scrappy "Decision Support Sciences" division a couple of years earlier. My "elder" colleague was making a good point in that new context where there was always a lot of "hype" flying around (program managers selling it to sponsors and tech folks selling it to program managers) and it appeared that every "new face" was given a grace period, but after a few years if they hadn't *consistently* kept their snake-oil fresh, they could be treated as *stale* snake-oil salesmen. I never quite hit that place in that division but saw it coming. I missed (or ducked) opportunities to move up into program or line management positions, which was the best (only?) way of avoiding becoming deprecated in place. A few of the "old fogies" managed to keep a tech niche open by supporting some obscure program or technology that nobody else really wanted, and no (fresh) snake oil was needed for. Others just hunkered down and depended on institutional inertia to carry them into (and beyond) early retirement. At 52 I "took my show on the road", accepting Bechtel's (LANL) buyout offer they put out to avoid having to do a forced layoff (they got 500 volunteers for the 800 staff they wanted to shed). This was also just as the SFComplex was forming so I spent a good 4 years working "double-time" to try to help make Sfx viable while pursuing my own professional work. I didn't feel (entirely) out of touch/date technically then, but I *was* aware that I couldn't keep up with both breadth and depth. To make it all a bit more painful, many of the technologies I had helped "pioneer" (in a minor way) over the preceding 3 decades had hit a point of resurgent popularity and ease-of-entry. Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, Discrete Simulation, Visual Analytics, Virtual Reality, Distributed Systems development, etc. were all *finally* becoming mainstream and *everybody* was on the bandwagon. But few had to hand-jam HTML, write socket-level communications, write raw OpenGL, do careful memory/pointer management, worry overmuch about vertex/texel budgets, avoid *all* use of >= N^2 complexity algorithms, etc. and those were the hard-won skills I had developed. Still useful but rarely critical. A few years ago, I gave up trying to maintain either "breadth" or "depth" for the most part. I still find "niches" I can contribute to and I find that a very small (diminishing) number of potential clients really understand and appreciate my unique offerings, but I feel surrounded/overwhelmed by the plethora of much more energetic/agile/up-to-date workers offering (at least superficially) similar wares. It is (not) satisfying for me to see my "younger" colleagues (many of you here in your 40's/50's) starting to feel that same pressure... but inevitable? This all leads me to wonder how much of the "automation economy" is going to invade the high-tech job market, and how that will be relieved. I don't know if it will be shortened workweeks, (much) earlier retirement, serial multiple careers, guaranteed minimum incomes, or some combination that relieves the combination of an accelerated change of pace and increased leverage/automation through technology. The holy grails of my early career such as hardware improvements to obviate the need for extreme memory/CPU/Network conservation, and code-reuse, have come to fruit and in many ways are the source of my own (and others?) deprecation. It feels not unlike the end of the 19th century farmer whose skills with animal husbandry may not have prepared him so much for the industrial-age overtaking agriculture. My grandfathers both endured/survived the end of that era. The elder still spoke nostalgically and fondly of the various mules he depended on up until he had to quit the farm in his late 60's. My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML. I barely know the names of the new tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/??? technology. Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings, - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
