Comment by RandoHolmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandoHolmes | Hacker News Reader

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I think WFH is particularly difficult for young people, not because they don't have access to seniors (or any other such drivel), but because they often don't have the discipline necessary for it.

For example, I've been doing freelance work for well over 10 years now and I eventually started insisting on having an extra office with a strict policy of the room is for work only (even if not paying work). The thing is, a lot of people will recommend things like dressing up as if you're going into work, taking a walk around the block as a transition, and so forth. But for me I can literally walk into that room completely naked straight from bed and have no issues.

But the thing is, what works for me doesn't work for you (and vice versa). But I've had over 10 years to figure out what works for me, young people haven't.

That's where their challenge is at, not in trying to learn from mentors, which can still happen even remote.

And some people just can't do it because they don't have the discipline and never will. Those people will fail, but that's on them.

Even when I was in my early 20s it took way more discipline for me to work in an open office than WFH. It's hard to concentrate on a task when your coworkers of all ages and ranks are talking about TV, sports, and politics all day long

Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?

Most children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car).

Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.

...perhaps other than the breakfast part, that’s exactly what most teenagers do every morning (at least in non-COVID) times.

Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

> Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

Then I think it's pretty clear that's not what I meant when I said children... It becomes even more clear when you realize I said "or their own car", or did you think it was my belief that 5 year olds were driving themselves to school?

I had covered teenagers earlier in my comment, and so I wanted to cover younger children with the rest of the comment.

Right but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?

Are you claiming that a 21 year old engineer is obviously going to be as experienced at life as a 40 year old engineer?

Because that's what you're implying here, and I don't think any reasonable person would make the claim that's obvious.

I think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/:

"Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the ages of 50 to 70 and then declined."

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same.

Doesn't sound that large.

But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

> But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

Exactly right. The sort of discipline I'm discussing here isn't conscientiousness.

Someone who scores low in conscientiousness, but then has children, is going to be a lot more responsible than they were before they had children.

Someone else accused me of reverse ageism. As if I'm biased against young people because I believe that people generally get better at life the more life experience they have. My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.

I will facetious say that it's (reverse) agism against young people by older people.

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