“Old age” is made up–and this concept is hurting everyone
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
From the employment perspective, there certainly are some companies where the benefits a more senior/experienced employee provide are wasted or ignored. In those cases, it makes sense for the company to replace the older worker with younger (cheaper and less opinionated) employee. Granted, I'm on the older side, so I'm not being ageist here.
From a consumer/user perspective, it's more about understanding your user than their age specifically. But generally speaking, much older users have very different backgrounds and experiences; thus, their approach to using things may be considerably different from that of a younger person. That said, most user interfaces and product features probably don't fit any userbase well. So in a way, the sea of bad interfaces isn't ageist - it's just bad UX.
Wow, that's really something else. You see this a lot on HN but this comment is really just breathtaking in the leaps it takes.
And elsewhere in the article: Half of older longtime job holders, meanwhile, are pushed out of their jobs before they planned to retire.
This is interesting to me, as while it certainly is true it doesn’t come close to saying what the author is trying to make it say imo. Yeah my grandparents have smartphones, I still wouldn’t call them tech savvy.
I work as one of a small team of developers in a rather old (demographically) vocational company, and while our team doesn’t do IT work per se, all the employees over 50 can’t tell the difference between the Dev team and IT support. They have no clue, and explaining it to them is impossible. Further, it’s a constant pain point for me working with older people on software related issues, especially when it comes to user interface details. Management is constantly pushing for interfaces to be as plain, simple, and stupid as possible to ensure that all employees can use internal tools without needing assistance.
Older people today do engage with technology but that doesn’t make them “tech savvy” and in my opinion they probably never will be. Subsequent generations (mine being one of the first) had the benefit of being introduced to computers at a very young age so to us it’s as natural as riding bike or making grilled cheese. I think that, no matter what we try to do, there’s no way to make older generations be “tech savvy” because they were deprived of that early exposure.
I think older people absolutely do have a desire to be tech savvy, I just don’t see how we get there. I’ve thought about this often but I don’t know what the solution is. Overall great article, and I’m probably a lot dumber than anyone who works at MIT AgeLabs so my opinion probably should be taken with a grain of salt
I work with people much older than that who use collaborative tools and cryptocurrency and the only difference is that they apply themselves and that there are social benefits to understanding.
A lot of older people find more social benefits from joking about how they dont understand with other ignorant people, it is a point of pride for them to have “never sent an email” because their friends say the same thing and thats it.
You have to create an incentive and many people lack that. There is no quantifiable brain plasticity argument while there is a repeatable incentive argument.
And yet you're incapable of building something that's usable. This is your failing, not theirs.
What is this supposed to mean? I really don't understand who "you" is in this context or what "usable" means.
Is this kind of personal attack the norm for you or have I offended you in some way? I’m new here so forgive me if this is just par for the course
And in our old age, tech will look nothing like it does today. Largely I think we'll be in the same predicament.
Context: I'm 50+, have been developing software professionally for 30 years, and I have a parent in his eighties.
My kids know how to use the latest social media apps sure, but they don't know how anything behind that phone and computer work at all. I can write Android apps all day long but they wouldn't even know where to start.
I had to teach my son how to punch a hole through the firewall to run a Minecraft server for his friends 5 or 6 years ago. After watching me build a few computers, he has now built his own top of the line rig. But he didn't just "know" that stuff because he's young, he had to have an interest and learn, from an old dude no less. It's just like people that drive cars, most of them do not know how cars work but they can still drive. I can also take a car apart and put it back together. I can do a ton of other technical things as well. It's not age, but interest in my opinion, that makes a person tech savvy.
Please don't lump all people over 50 together. Many of us designed and built the tech that you are so proud of now. We stood on the shoulders of giants and so do you. Your time is coming as and "old person." Always remember that.
This is someone who worked on radar systems, cryptographic systems, computers, power electronics, control systems, and measurement systems in the military and civilian worlds from the 1960s to early 2000s. He built his own kit electronics for home audio and later a ZX-80 computer. He followed the whole PC revolution from the CP/M and DOS days to Windows 7. He participated in BBS systems in the 1980s and used the Internet since around 1991. He exposed his children and friends to science and tech.
He followed countless changes from minicomputers and teletypes, to PCs with CRTs and text CLIs, to window-based GUIs. Then, he started to struggle with the abstractions of these same GUIs as well as web sites. He struggles to identify the boundaries between different programs and content, like some novice user who never understood how it was all put together. Worse, he is aware of this struggle and of his losses. I can see that it frustrates him daily. Once in a while, I'd say it terrifies him.
Similar problems come up with very young people. Not only can dementia itself exhibit itself in the young, but people can become tuned out to anything outside their interests and expertise and lose interest in learning through play and experimentation. When this happens people become locked in their modes and may not move forward.
To add some anecdata I know people who were prolific programmers with perl CGI scripts but were never able to make the jump to modern application programming, not even the relatively easy transition to "modern perl". At the same time I know some older programmers who have contributed to modern apps while working on both embedded devices and machine learning and love being at the forward edge of everything.
There are many aspects to work in technology and age is a minor factor especially compared to attitude and interest. This reminds me of how Victor Frankl describes in Man's Search for Meaning that people expected the strong and healthy to endure life in concentration camps and yet many died within days while some who were weak and sick endured because they had something that kept them going through the greatest challenges. Age and experience are factors, but it is how they are framed and leveraged that actually matters.
Whether my time is coming or not is irrelevant though, I’m specifically targeting a unique generation that grew up without computers being a normalized aspect of their lives, and ruminating on the implications of that.
I also think the definition of “tech savvy” is a bit loose here, for me it’s that you can figure out how to navigate an interface like say Facebook and perform some task they rarely do (change their password maybe) without additional assistance. It’s a low bar
This is called performative[0] ignorance, in the world view of the person interacting with you they are a senior person (older, longer time with the company) and you are a junior person (younger, less tenure) so it is their place to assign you tasks. The world has moved on but this whole "I don't know computers" act allows them to preserve their self perceived social status.