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There's More To Look Forward To After Peaking Professionally
When it comes to our working lives, there's a point when we're no longer in our prime. But science shows that we hit our peak professionally far sooner than we think we do.
That's the conclusion social scientist Arthur Brooks draws in a new essay in The Atlantic.
His research began after eavesdropping on a conversation on an airplane in 2015. At the time, Brooks felt at the top of his game as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, and writing bestselling books. "Things couldn't have gone better," he tells NPR.
On the plane, he sat in front of a man and a woman. The man — who Brooks writes was in his mid-80s — told the woman that he wished he was dead.
"I thought it was somebody who must have been really disappointed about his life," he says. "But then at the end of the flight he stood up and I recognized him as somebody who's really quite prominent and who'd done a lot with his life."
He wondered what the man must have been doing wrong to feel this way.
"I decided to figure out how, after 50, life can get better and more fulfilling," he says. He tells NPR he thinks he found some answers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday June 26 2019, @08:12PM (8 children)
A better question is: Teach WHAT?
In many industries any knowledge more than 5 or 10 years old is "ancient" and "obsolete" and must be burned with fire. Even if it really isn't, that is how it is perceived.
It's really fucking great spending an entire lifetime learning and mastering something useful just to have the rest of the world turn around and shit on it. It is no wonder that so many formerly successful people wish they were dead.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 26 2019, @09:06PM (2 children)
The languages and specific tech aren't as important as the generalized knowledge accumulated along the way.
Today's old fart vs whippersnapper debate was: design patterns, when does it pay off to invest up front to make downstream code "more maintainable." Answer: not as often as the theory would tell you.
So much code is prototyped quickly and discarded, or mostly disused. Knowing when to invest in a documented well segmented architecture and when to just rip off a quick and dirty proof of concept is an art that can be taught, but rarely do newbies come down in the middle near the optimum balance.
Same for knowing how to keep a system architecture segmented so that it hangs together as a cooperating collection of small simple tools, rather than a giant monolithic thing that's continually dysfunctional.
These lessons apply regardless of how new your language and IDE are, and don't seem to often be learned in the first 10 or so years of professional experience.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:33AM (1 child)
Geezer technicians, especially former Navy technicians, are a real pleasure to work with because back in their day the armed services trained real technicians as opposed to mere operators like they do now.
Old skool military techs learned in 4-6 years how to troubleshoot anything to the component level, as well as decent mechanical and power tool skills, and trace circuits through spaghetti hell. Now, the military trains operators rather than techs. They push buttons and have to call Sarge everytime a button gets stuck or the printer gets jammed, they may even memorize the right sequence of button-pushing appropriate to a given situation, but when you have a one-off prototype board go bad in a critical project, you want a geezer to grab it with his pruniform hands and fix that shit.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:30PM
I worked in a (simple) avionics factory in the late 1980s. 95% women doing the assembly, with one ex-navy tech per department doing the troubleshooting / snafu fixing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
In many industries, knowledge more than 5 or 10 years old IS ancient and obsolete.
The obvious one is software. It's not just learning the latest fad languages; look in fields of AI, data analytics, and what have you.
Besides that, though, material sciences change constantly, which affect things like civil engineering. All sorts of engineering changes based on new knowledge and experiences when bridges fall down or when planes crash. Even things which people think of as being static change a lot. Compare a manager needing to deal with Millennial entering the workforce against the same position 10 years ago dealing with Generation X/Millennial transition people. Compare how a modern marketer salesman needs to use Facebook, Twitter, and similar as compared 10 years ago when Google was the big thing (an 10 years before that when TV was still king). Consider a financier now compared to 10 years ago (during the height of the Great Recession).
Granted, that is no reason to denigrate people with that experience. Even if the field has changed a lot in 10 years, people with that experience have a lot more background to apply the knowledge and filter out the garbage as compared to the modern developments compared to a fresh-out-of-school worker.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:14PM
It’s not that the knowledge becomes obsolete, it’s that you have new layers of tools and applications that make it unnecessary to learn first principles. In my field, for example, Maxwell’s Equations haven’t changed, but you don’t need to know them to turn out a product: the architect picks out a chip set based on the desired feature set, and the rest of the team handles the details using CAD tools that understand issues like manufacturability, signal integrity, RFI, thermal performance, and so on.
I’m not a softie, but I got exposed to it all the time, and my impression is that the fundamental concepts like looping, recursion, pattern matching, and so on, are all still there. Only the syntax has changed, along with hardware improvements that may change which programming approach is optimum.
On bridges, I can’t believe that there have been significant changes it what material science has to offer. Most bridges that fall down fail because of a lack of maintainance, or aesthetic compromise, or incompetence. See Genoa and the Florida pedestrian walkway.
Where innovation really is taking place, no one is really entirely sure how it works, or it’s non-deterministic in some way that’s either subtle or overt: NN and machine learning, “quantum computers”, and immunology come to mind.
So why pay for this expertise in older workers if you don’t need it? After all, you might increase the probability of divulging precious “intellectual property”. You know, the kind that the US sends to foreign manufacturing operations all over the world.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:58AM
He shuld give a class 2 teach old ppl how 2 post on twitter. Trump duz, u shuld2. twitter iz gud.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:04AM
This attitude has been around forever, it isn't something that just happened to affect tech the last 15 years. I have done well by concentrating on mastery in skills likely to remain in demand long into the future: C, C++ and Java. Conversely, when it comes to boutique technologies that only my employer is likely to use, I actively refuse to become too good at it. Lest I become designated the last rat on the ship as they decommission that technology themselves.
And what successful person wishes he was dead? TFS sounds like he made that up. I see successful people start space programs, buy dying media outfits, or accidentally kill themselves with the airplane or sailboat they bought.
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:18PM
*** It is no wonder that so many formerly successful people wish they were dead. ***
Building your self-worth and personality fully around such a transient thing as a career is asking for trouble. You know your job is finite and ends sooner than you do. What will you be when the market says the thing you do is no longer needed from you? It's better to see your job as a thing you do and not a thing you are. The skills and traits underlying the thing you do won't be lost after termination. Focus on what you are and you'll be fine. Mistake what you do with who you are and see the world fall apart after you are retired.