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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.

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I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it.

I know a woman who until recently worked as a secretary to one of the presidents of a large regional bank. The first thing she did each morning was to print out the president's e-mails, and bring them to him on paper. He would then dictate his responses and she would send the e-mail responses for him.

The job paid big bucks for several reasons:

- She knows how to take fast, accurate dictation with steno. They don't teach that anywhere anymore.

- She knows how to file. Real paper files.

- She would place his phone calls for him, old-fashioned style. He would say, "I need to talk to Mr. X," and a in a couple of minutes she'd be on the phone: "Is this Mr. X? Please hold for bank president Y."

- She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

- She didn't mind making coffee for the boss. It's a hate crime to even ask these days, but she did it happily.

That bank president must have a very low stress level, since he only had to see his paper e-mail once a day.

You read my mind with that last sentence. As I read your anecdote, I was marveling at how much relief she probably created by circumventing the email/slack/txt/messenger treadmill the rest of us are forced to run on during a workday.

>the email/slack/txt/messenger treadmill the rest of us are forced to run on during a workday.

Or at all hours of the evening, night and early morning, since some people we work with don't seem to understand the concept of leaving work at work.

You can enforce such rules on your own, by slowly trimming down after-hours "work" (since it is unpaid, it's not work to me). You can compensate this with very good time management and always being on time/reading up on meeting agendas. Nobody will openly criticize you for such a practice since everyone sees you as together and competent. Eventually they get used to this status quo and nobody will even question it anymore in your case. It might take you a few years, but it pays off in the end I think.

Maybe the _are_ still at work! :-)

I think having an assistant would be a relief even if I read my own email.

I know law partners who are like this. If they generate so much value for their employer they can hire an assistant solely to bridge the technology gap.

My father was exactly like this (he retired last year after 49 years in practice as a lawyer, several decades of which he was managing partner of his own firm) - if he needed to send an email, just like sending a letter, he would shout down the corridor to his secretary and she would send it for him. Here's one just for the HN open-office haters: he only really retired because the consultancy gig he'd taken on for the twilight of his career (during which he still had a secretary who would send emails for him) switched to an open-office floor plan and he was extremely miserable because he could no longer take a nap after lunch.

Curiously, post-retirement he's bought a smartphone and is actually moderately competent with it, in a way I never really saw him be with a computer...

> - She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

> - She didn't mind making coffee for the boss. It's a hate crime to even ask these days, but she did it happily.

This seems like very strange editorializing to me. Do backpacks bother you so much? Who is complaining about making coffee if that's in the job description?

There are some groups of people that find such tasks offensive/beneath them. I don't understand why, I have just seen it in practice.

Perhaps my experience is unique, but in the places i've worked, everybody made each other tea all the time when their colleages were busy - and if one thing was certain, its that the boss never made their own tea. I don't think it was every considered a problem. That was just the order of things

I would be surprised if this is still not one of the responsibilities of secretaries that work for CEO's.

What’s wrong with having a bookbag?

Here in Finland, practically everyone carries one. From young kids to grown adult men and women. I even saw an old person with one the other day. One can’t carry as much nor is it practical to use briefcases.

They said it themselves. Its about _looking_ a part. If they wanted practicality it would be business casual and a backpack but its not about that. Monkey suit and briefcase shows you're willing to jump through the hoops, toe the line and wear the uniform.

I think the Finnish point was that in Finland you are looking the part with a back pack.

I'd argue that briefcase's are more practical for that kind of job where it involves a lot of paperwork, as you can lay them flat without worrying about crumbling them.

I'll allow a book strap.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/illustration-depicting-...

You accidentally hit the core of the coffee problem. Woman in your story is secretary and coffee and baby sitting boss is her job description. Bank (industry) professionals are not expected to make coffee nor write boss mails. The women who complain about the coffee requirement are complaining that they are treated as secretaries and expected to do secretarial work, despite being industry professionals.

It is also dominance game - there is that thug-of-war among professionals over autonomy, leadership, ideas, credit, blame and what not. A person that should have no authority to order her around is ordering her around in front of third parties, which makes him look more like a boss and her more like secretary. Both request and complaint are office politics. Not coincidentally, secretaries (unlike industry professionals) are supposed to act rather submissive and manage boss emotions rather then propose ideas, argue or fight for them.

- She knows how to take fast, accurate dictation with steno. They don't teach that anywhere anymore.

Of course they do, usually it's directed at court jobs, but anyone can take a steno course.

Court stenography is computerized now. And even decades ago was mechanized.

"Steno" with pencil and a steno pad. Not a stenography machine.

Yes, but there are still shorthand classes, e.g. https://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/TutorialServices/Pages/tutorialcou... (search for "Office Administration & Technology")

> - She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

This is something I've been thinking more and more about lately. I used to be happy with the lax attitude most tech places have to attire but honestly I look around my office now and I wish we had a bit more of a dress standard. I was a tshirt and hoodie fiend but changed to slacks/smart jeans and a shirt recently. I've been on the end of so many barbs and jokes from coworkers over this (which I take in good humour). Interestingly I've found that I'm being taken more seriously by our management side/CTO etc. I have no interest in moving over there by the way, I'll be coding til I retire.

I'm going to be asked why we should change and what's wrong with the casual approach. I think if as a profession we want to be taken seriously, we need to start looking the part. Sure a lawyer could rock up into court wearing shorts and a faded 1980s Man Utd jersey and still do a good job, but honestly what would you actually think of him? What is actually wrong with looking smart?

Right! Workplaces seem to advertise to, for example, computer people how they are relaxed and that you can come to work in jeans. I just want to get to wear a suit for once, for the enjoyment of myself and others!

We had Classy (Client* Team) Mondays at a previous job of mine. The whole larger group would come in dressed up in suits and business appropriate dresses, then have some nibbles and drinks afterwards.

Pretty much a reverse of a casual Friday.

* Client in the client-server computing sense.

Monday is a good day for that as well - gives you time to panic-prepare/iron on sunday evening :)

I'd do the same if they invested in proper AC (Germany wide issue). But for now, shorts it is until summer is over.

>but honestly what would you actually think of him

I would hire him as my full time lawyer in a heartbeat, but that's just me.

If you'd hire someone based solely on their clothing (the only data point we have here), then you should review your decision making processes.

Warren Buffett I believe works in a similar way - his emails are printed out and he dictates responses. It probably saves quite a lot of time over checking the inbox in the usual way.

If you spent your life becoming very efficient in a particular environment, there's an incentive to keep this environment from changing, and not to expend any effort to learn a new environment. That learning capacity can be more efficiently spent elsewhere.

(An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)

A big component of mastery is wiring your brain to make the right decision without sweating over the details like you did when you were 25. Replacing problem solving with intuition. But what happens 20 years later when your intuition is no longer correct? Or when someone keeps asking why? You’re out of practice, And you’re trying to rewire a part of your brain that is no longer part of your internal dialog.

Teaching seems to be one way to avoid this. You have to keep defending your decisions. Switching specializations (or creating new ones) is another. The only other way I know is to seek outside help, and that level of humility is rare in experts.

There is another way. Keep challenging yourself with new projects, be a life learner.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

It gets better: there are places selling their software via hardware appliances that run RHEL6.

That is better, actually. If it's proven for that many years why mess with it? Why assume that older is unilaterally worse?

Ecliptic Curve cryptography. In-tree driver modules for last year's 10Gb Ethernet cards. Python 2.7, let alone 3. Official support for kernel 4.x.

I've barely been in the industry for 90 days and I've already had to deal with the lack of the above in RHEL6.

(Indirectly, mind you; but I believe that the transition between RHEL6 and CentOS6 is negligible for the current topic.)

Hardware appliances would generally be one place none of these things matter - you know if your gray box ships with a 10gbe card or not, customer doesn’t care about userland versions, etc.

That said, I also hate working on RHEL 6.

What's better than a relatively impenetrable appliance? One that manifestly doesn't care about security and therefore uses an old kernel and vulnerable userland. If they use an old unsupported OS, what other vulnerable libraries are hiding inside?

RHEL 6 is supported until 2024.

Oh, goody, just in time for the theoreticians to finally tell us that any kind of speculative execution can be made into a security flaw, and that there's nothing to do about it but to crawl back into a hole, err, I mean, back to ARM micro-controllers. :)

RISCV :)

> none of those things matter

... unless the software's needs evolve over time such as to require them.

> you know if your gray box ships with a 10gbe card or not

Yes; and lucky we do know. Else, our upcoming model of gray boxes that - unlike their predecessors - aren't approaching EOL but are only available with 10gbe cards ... would already be shipping with broken networking.

Hypothetically, if you needed python couldn't you either compile it to binary or just install the runtime ? I don't see how a language would be coupled to the version of Linux.

Doing so means putting all Python packages into a single opaque OS-level package. Not fun when your build system and related infrastructure, were all designed to work with OS-level packages.

Why? You just use package dependencies to indicated that they depend on the New Python.

Third-party dependencies. Their BRPMs will all install to the OS's old Python. Pull them from PyPI using setup.py, and we get the problem I describe; the alternative is to build our own BRPMs, which is a massive headache to set up.

Can't you just set PYTHON_PATH="where yoy put python" ?

> all Python packages

That's a weakness in the language. You trade such a simple syntax for dependency hell. Oh, you wanted XML-derp-3.5.2.9.6? Well that requires XML-slurp-2.6.5.9.77 and you only have '75, sorry bud, can't possibly work. Oh but if you upgrade XML-slurp that breaks pycairo-2.7.55-1 and all your GUI code will stop working. Fun stuff.

Not my choice. We've had over 50kloc of Python for several years before I arrived. The packaging shenanigans still occasionally sputter.

>there are still places running RHEL6 in production

We just got off of RHEL5, so I can understand why there are people still running 6.

There are places that just forked RHEL5ish and update the kernel and packages. At some point it's a mess, but until then, just keep patching.

> An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while.

I recently interviewed at a startup (though a reasonably far-along/mature, if not spectacularly successful by VC standards) that was both running RHEL6 and depending a remarkable amount on "enterprise" gear, software, and support, which seemed incongruous for any small company, let alone a startup.

They did see it as worthwhile to "migrate" to CentOS6, but I'm pretty sure the interviewer who was the incumbent rejected me quickly and strenuously after I admitted a preference for Ubuntu (due to its package ecosystem better catering to a wider array of developers, making my DevOps culture evangelism and implementation that much easier) and a focus on frugality first when it comes to hardware (that being a huge benefit of it being a commodity).

> They have more important things to do.

Poe's Law aside, I do actually find this to be a valid argument, if it's presented eyes-open, rather than just through inertia.

That is, there's a difference between having considered the migration and deciding it's not worth it (or that the "more important things" are more worth it and take priority) and not having considered the migration at all because those "more important things" completely consumed everyone's attention. I don't mean to present these as a false dichotomy, just two extremes that illustrate my point.

> (An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)

We're currently re-building all our systems to target RHEL6 because that's what the execs decided, if we're lucky the project will be done before it's end of lifed. They also decided that we'd be using modern c++, more modern than the GCC that ships with RHEL6. Thanks to these largely incompatible requirements the team responsible has practically built their own distro on top of RHEL6, with a newer gcc and a rebuild of all the libraries we use complete with it's own package management system. I think it's customized enough that a highly doubt redhat could off us any support anyway.

My parents both had Ph.D. educations in chemistry. A big part of my father's work involved scientific programming in Fortran. Both used computers in their research. Neither really got on board with the internet. My father never even used email. My mom did, but minimally.

For many people who started worked before the 80’s, using a keyboard is for clerical work, and a sign of reduced social status.

Doctors expect to be catered to. They're at the top of an entire apparatus designed for their convenience, that starts by making people come for appointments on their schedule, and ends with it being acceptable for them still to use paper charts in 2018.

I'm not blaming these guys, they're part of a system that treats them like gods.

Age? How many young kids are curious about how plumbing works or lawnmower engines? It probably has more to do with you and your friends being curious about something and not understanding why other people in general aren't curious about it.

> who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser

Do you need to now IP protocol to use the internet?

Old people generally don't like change, they have things set up as they like them.

If you need to configure a computer, understand the difference between an email and a webmail and imap, what is a certificate and why it matters, you need a basic understanding of how these things work.

Right, but they don't need to configure that crap, they get someone else to do it.

> who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser

Out of and interest in both computer protocols and medicine, I'm curious to know if you have any specific examples of those concepts you mention.

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