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To piggy-back of off this. The hidden problems aren't just extensions of old-age experience vs young-age experience (i.e. social-network vs hospice placement). It's often domain expertise vs none. There are so many older folks out there who have had decades of experience in one domain that none of us have even heard of, or are only, maybe, vaguely aware of. They are aware of that domain's problems, know most of the key players, etc.

My father is a Director-level exec at a Fortune 100 company, and I've talked to him, ad nauseam, about the problems he wishes the enterprise line-of-business crapware his company keeps purchasing would actually solve. I keep trying to convince him to strike out and do something, and have even offered to go in on something with him, but he's just too comfortable. He has more than enough money, and he's decided to retire early if he doesn't get the next promotion he's gunning for.

He was recently honored by the trade association of the domain he's an executive in (I guess there's no harm in saying it's logistics). I'm sure the contacts he has would send a startup hurtling into the stratosphere within a few years. How many people are like him out there, who are going to waste all their domain expertise on retirement or the next promotion?

I feel like someone needs to write a manifesto to the older and successful among us about how they owe it to themselves and the younger generation to disrupt the industries they've been leading for so long. These fat-cat, lazy ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.

Exactly! But they don't even need to be successful. Just the fact that they have spent years dabbling with something.

A slightly absurd example of a way to surface this would be to do a kind of "retirement interview".

If he retires early, that's the perfect time to pull him into something entrepreneurial. When the viable alternative is "play golf", a stab in the dark looks a) more interesting and b) low risk (because you can always go play golf).

I think the role of fortune 100 companies is more to keep the lights on then disrupt. Disruption and new direction rely on a foundation of the current state. Yes that foundation will be replace, but only by the best of ten disruption that survived while its peers perished.

I think we all agree on that.

The Parent was just saying that his father complains about these "hidden problems" and the parent wished his father would strike out on his own and solve some of them.

But thats just how I read it.

>These fat-cat, lazy ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.

How long before young and sexy startup becomes lazy fat cat nowadays? Maybe ten years? So, now the older crowd needs to constantly re-do everything because the younger guys got lazy? I'm not sure what the solution you're advocating here is. Eventually, everyone becomes a fat cat it seems, at least to the eyes of the new guy. I suspect the $bad_vendor or $bad_project isn't that bad and the time/work commitment to constantly re-do it is non-trivial. Especially if by the time you finish this big rewrite its already obsolete or unlikeable in some way -- not HTML5 or not whatever is hot right now.

I think part of maturing is knowing how to recognize the grind and when to actually disrupt it in some way. Is $boring_logistics app really the problem that needs to be solved at $big_co? Arguably, the execs have better things to do and that judgement is what we're paying them for. When it becomes a problem they should know and address it, but to a young guy spoiled by ultra-shiny ipad apps, well, that logistics interface looks "old and boring" but its actually doing the job well.

> but he's just too comfortable.

Perhaps this is besides the point, but maybe there's a shelf-life on human 'can do' attitudes? Ten years ago I'd do anything that piqued my interest, obsess over it, and now its a lot more difficult to get excited and motivated especially if you have been in the grind long enough. At a certain point you realize this is all folly. Another product, another roll out, another set of unhappy/happy customers, another sales projection, another competitor to worry about, another thing that will obsolete in a week, etc. From a psychological perspective, we don't often talk about what it means to have a lifetime of work under your belt. How does it affect us? Is it reasonable to spend ages 22-65 working in the same industry/focus?

Imagine if we put monkeys in a cube and forced them to do the same-ish things for decades. We would probably be arrested for animal abuse. But its okay to do to people apparently. Maybe have some sympathy for the codgers, they're as much victims of this weird world we call work as anyone.

This is an interesting question: is there a shelf life on "can do" attitudes? I think just in allowing that this fact might be true changes my perspective -- hinting that we might be in a kind of startup-frenzy groupthink even in this discussion.

I agreed with this up until this sentence.

> They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.

I think that they absolutely have the imagination, as well as the skill and experience, to solve these problems. What they lack is tolerance for risk.

Yeah I could have worded that better.

The point I was just trying to make is that older generation might be caught up in certain ways of solving things, where as younger generations might come into it with a different paradigm in mind.

I was trying to make a very specific point but I did that I guess poorly.

The young will often times "reinvent the wheel" not knowing that not only does the concept of a wheel exist, but many wheels before them have been manufactured.

I know I have done this and as I have gotten to middle age I have seen younger developers do this as well.

Wheel reinvention is often futile but sometimes leads to brilliant new inventions. Also, their is an old adage about young scientists sometimes making major discoveries because they don't yet know what is impossible.

That's... a pretty insightful observation.

I suppose if you'd create a company that tried to exploit the comparative advantages of young and old staff, you'd face problems of leadership - who should run the show? The young, or the old?

But I think it could be worth trying out in Hackerspace context. I'm adding to my TODO list to try and encourage some 50+ people to hang out in our space; maybe they could contribute some important problems and good insights that the regular young crowd could tackle with the energy we have.

Thank you for sharing that quote.

Thanks.

And yes there is all sorts of issues that could arise for sure.

I have been thinking about ways to force out these hidden problems from people with more experience. Perhaps just doing a bunch of interviews and writing a book/blog about them. Another idea I have is to try make a podcast where we invite people in with experience from industries and then try and figure out what problems hide inside the organizations that we are not aware of.

It all came from an ASK HN i did a while back where I asked "What problem in your industry is a potential startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007

The answers there were mind-numbing to me cause it showed me how much insight is actually needed not just to solve a problem but also to find it to begin with.

> It all came from an ASK HN i did a while back where I asked "What problem in your industry is a potential startup"

Oh, that was your thread. Then thanks again, for posting that. I remember it because I found it somehow only few days ago, and bookmarked after reading through. The anwser there were not what I expected, and they revealed a whole world of problems that are not obvious but very important and in need of solving. They reminded me of this old edw519's classic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724198

(Also check out http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html if you haven't seen it before; edw519 has posted some incredibly insightful stuff over the years; one of the best programming reads I've ever seen.)

Yes it was quite amazing to get all that great feedback. I tried it on both Reddit and Quora but it didn't go so well could be timing could be that it's lacking the incredible varied backgrounds that HN after all have.

And yes Ed519 always have some incredible insightful comments on of my favorite commenters.

> exposure to these hidden problems

I think this is a key to experience. I spent a large part of my 20s diving into problems and totally screwing up the solution. I learned a ton from this.

On the flip side, maybe 50% of those problems don't exist anymore, because new technology or methodologies have solved them. Knowing how to use CVS or SVN doesn't really count for much in a world dominated by git.

I think that's where I value a deep understanding of CS and core engineering practices, regardless of age. Understanding pointers, how to debug, and the difference of the heap vs. the stack hasn't changed much over the years.

Yeah the hidden problems I am talking about are less specific.

Some of them are problems like workers unions standing in the way of automation of some shipping procedure or that people never thought about it as a problem but rather the cost of doing business.

Technology definitely removes a lot of those barriers over time as you say. But there are still plenty of problems that aren't technological and perhaps those are the most interesting.

> But there are still plenty of problems that aren't technological and perhaps those are the most interesting.

100% agree. A lot of problems involve navigating a particular business domain or learning how to work with people.

> Knowing how to use CVS or SVN doesn't really count for much in a world dominated by git.

I don't understand the point you are tying to make. What has git so fundamentally changed that SVN/CVS don't count as knowledge / experience?

Additionally, who says git is dominating? Here, on this forum, it has popularity. In industry its almost unknown. And guess which is the larger part of the world?

> In industry its almost unknown.

Maybe I'm in a microcosm, but everybody in industry I work with switched to git years ago. And I'm definitely not in the valley. :-)

There's danger of selection bias. Would you work for a company that used a different tool?

> Would you work for a company that used a different tool?

Of course.

Most companies I've seen when freelancing as a web dev in Germany either used git or were in the process of migrating from SVN to git.

That said, there's selection bias involved.

A few data points to consider:

1) I happen to work in a dev tools company and we definitely see momentum towards git in our customer base. Broadly speaking 2/3rds of our customers (SMEs, F50s, etc. across a broad array of industries) are using it wholly or migrating to it.

2) Several of the larger proprietary SCMs are debuting git compatibility (e.g. p4), implying a belief that expending engineering resources along those lines is perceived as worthwhile.

3) The stackoverflow dev survey that came out recently had git with ~69% of the market: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...

4) GitHub (just part of the git market) has over 10M repos now: https://github.com/blog/1724-10-million-repositories

You can always hope for more data, up to the limit of every programmer on earth answering your question(s), but the trend in the available data is clear: git is extremely popular and becoming ever moreso.

Every company I have worked for, since 2001, has used Perforce. My latest employer was starting to think about maybe possibly using something else, but I doubt it will happen.

I suspect this is a generational thing. The companies I have worked for were generally formed in the nineties or 00s, when the free source control systems didn't exist or weren't yet popular. The companies being formed now use Git almost universally.

I've been writing since the late 80's professionally and had to look up Perforce. Mostly we used stuff we created until the late 90s and then it was Subversion. Once dragged to git about 10 years ago I would never look back. We do host it ourselves for security using atlassian stash though. Love it.

Because Perforce is fantastic. Nothing else comes close. The chance to work at a Perforce shop again might even lure me away...

Those stupid old guys eating steak, when all the cool kids are eating burgers...

In industry its almost unknown.

So unknown that even Microsoft offers git functionality in Visual Studio now: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Code/git/ove....

Maybe it's not dominating (or maybe it is, don't care), but to say that git is almost unknown is a bit strong, IMO.

> What has git so fundamentally changed that SVN/CVS don't count as knowledge / experience?

I think git (and other distributed source control systems) changed the culture around branching and forking. So, if you're coming from a CVS world, there is a lot of technology that changed, and the technology changed the culture/methodology.

I.e., if you dropped a CVS user from 1996 into today's world, they would have culture shock, not just a new technology to learn.

All source control tools have a different model of the source history. You have to relearn that to change tools.

The culture change mentioned is nothing to do with Git. It has to do with GitHub. We can talk about that too if we want to.

Of course, git was developed by an old guy that used CVS, so....

Replace CVS with BitKeeper, and you'd be right.

Linus never used CVS because he couldn't stand it. The kernel had no version control until BitKeeper came along specifically because Linus wasn't sold on version control until he discovered BitKeeper, and then when McVoy killed their licenses, Linus chose to write his own system because he didn't like any of the existing ones.

I must be getting old

But BitKeeper was created by an old guy (Larry Larry McVoy[1]) who was born in 1962. Not only that, but BitKeeper is built on top of SCCS[2] which predates RCS (and RCS predates CVS).

BitKeeper was a totally new solution to a very old problem that was "solved" years ago. It was created by an "old guy" who knew the wheel had a large flat spot and figured out how to make it round. It was subsequently adopted by another "old guy" (Linus) who refused to use wheels with flat spots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McVoy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System

Are we confusing age and culture with stupidity?

A stupid person wouldn't be able to adapt, or might have trouble adapting from one tool to another. That's a stupid person. Likewise a stupid person might think that an organization that was shipping successful products and making money was making a big mistake by not migrating off of svn.

Stupid is stupid, age is a different dimension. "culture" especially regarding tooling like this is sort of a cop-out.

It's true! I did a fair bit of programming and other computery things in undergrad and had a pretty good track record for, say, transforming some trash from behind the CS department into a workable computer. I was happy with Emacs, resisted vi, could whip up a nice html page with some cutting-edge CSS 3. By no means did I have special talents but I was sort of up to date on a broad range of basic computer-related skills, from hardware to networks to web design.

But then... I went to grad school in pure math. Seven years later, I emerged from a rip van winkle sleep to a whole new world. Still hand-writing my html, like all mathematicians do, I was astounded to wake up to a world with... frameworks?! AJAX! Rails! widespread use of IDEs, an IDE for every language or taste, Javascript everywhere... Python and Ruby as non-fringe languages....

It was a bit of culture shock and it was fun.

The major concepts are still the same.

I can agree with this on so many levels. As a student in a somewhat challenged branch of it, I often feel like me and my fellow students are "wasting" time on merely explaining theories, when in reality, a lot of us are very eager to get our hands dirty with something real.

Universities have a limited amount of ressources which means that you're pretty much left alone to figure your entire study-plan out to yourself, including picking partners and/or cases for examns. While this is not at all impossible, I know for a fact that a lot of students around me are eager to participate in something that weighs a little heavier than their own interest in social media or gaming.

Yes thats my experience with a lot of young people too. So the question is whether there is some way to channel the experience of hacknat's father (see his comment) and make it available in a way that make sense to younger generations?

Is it even possible to bridge or are we just left with the cold hard facts that these things only happens when they happens.