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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, 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.
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(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.
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