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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: 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.