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Comment by blackbrokkoli | Hacker News Reader

It's weird that the article pulls out statistics that underline Intels wrongdoing (ρ(age, awareness of rights/pay/...) but not the statistics that might be the reason: Older people are less innovative, learn slower and so on. Ergo, if you're for example firing the bottom percentile of "adapted the new data entry tool", there is a good chance that the avg will be higher than the avg of all people working there

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>Older people are less innovative, learn slower and so on.

Why should I or anyone else believe this about older and more experienced programmers? I can't think of many fields where more experienced practitioners are generally worse...

'Oh, you don't know the latest JS/PHP/Python web framework? Prfff, what a dinosaur.'

> Older people are less innovative

Well, maybe you are just speaking for yourself or your peer group.

I would be a little more inclusive in my terminology and more likely to say "The average person can be less innovative after they have aged excessively."

One of the interesting things about natural-born innovators is that they are very seldom average people.

> Everyone starts out at a relatively low level, rises to a max and then decline as they age

When it comes to native innovative ability, it starts out at a relatively high level, is capable of growing exponentially over time, and only declines in growth rate AFTER the subject has aged excessively.

Innovation itself is one of the extreme cases where the only viable substitute for starting early and decades of experience, is to have a windfall of good fortune.

Which is why most innovation occurs due to a windfall of good fortune rather than the result of a goal being reached as planned.

Given that "Older people are less innovative, learn slower and so on." what would you guess the average age of founders with a successful startup exit is?

(A) 22

(B) 26

None of the above. Try 47.

https://digitopoly.org/2017/07/17/the-young-entrepreneur-myt...

That is interesting (especially regarding the comment below citing an even higher age)!

But I'm not sure how that converts to the skills you need to have to be an employable Intel worker, which are most certainly a lot different

My (admittedly snarky) post was in response was to the "old people are slow" comment. You are probably right though on the different skills.

<snark>

Perhaps being a successful founder doesn't require as much neural plasticity as being an older worker at Intel. ;-)

</snark>

That might be the reason for most of the startup failing eh? Statistics can be taken anywhere.

I’m not sure I understand. 47 is the average age for founders with successful exits.

There's science to prove you wrong [1].

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/joop.12031

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

We aren't slower. We only move in the right directions.

I would say older employees in corporations tend to be middle managers. If the layoffs affect more management than the engineering side you are going to have a skewed graph.

It would be nice if productivity was measured by line of codes. That way we get rid of all the managers and executives who spend their days to come up with stupid ideas and say 'make it so by arbitrary date'.

Well as with developers, some managers are good and some not. Let's not follow Larry Page's attempt to fire all the project managers at Google in 2001 http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...

Interesting article. I had no idea Google was called BackRub? I was using Google...in 2001 (even before?) and never knew of it as BackRub.

Anyways - I probably wouldn't want to fire all managers. But based on the directives they come up with, I feel managers and executives have lost touch with their product and process. It would be nice of they could have a dose of "Undercover boss" and be forced to do some worker bee work once in a while. Then their directives would probably be closer to reality.

I work in the internal integration space and work with lots of teams. Very often they'd come up with some requirement, or a date that is far fetched and it all comes from above. I'd need to talk some sense into people and tell them why their idea is bad, or their timeline poses a risk.

Yeah, I can't wait to get pay deducted for days when you remove fluff from the code base or refactor code into more readable and efficient software.

Lines-of-code/time is a terrible measurement.

My comment was actually sarcasm...because you can't measure middle managers and executives output by lines of code since they don't actually code but more often than not they are the ones pushing for LOC measurment - or some other objective measurement, when they themselves have no quantitative way to measure output.

Fair enough, I didn't pick up on that.

I fully agree with that last comment.

My greatest accomplishment in the last year was deleting 30-50 thousand lines of code. I've written probably a thousand. Some days I spend 6 hours debugging something to change 4 lines.

This often encourages bloated and less elegant, simple code

My comment was actually sarcasm...because you can't measure middle managers and executives output by lines of code since they don't actually code. Not sure why so many people are offended on the idea when it's not even possible to implement.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Ah yes, so after all those layoffs of older employees, Intel and IBM nowadays should be true powerhouses of innovation!

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