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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>"I mean even at Google (on a different team) I was a "technical lead" in my 20s, and let me tell you, I had noooo business leading anything technical of any importance. But this is very common! We would never accept this in other fields. Would you live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their late 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would you drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?"

one of the strangest and most baffling things about the entire industry tbh. Like, would you ever expect a 25 year old guy to command a spaceship? Yet in software you have these weekly "I'm 40, is my life over" posts. In most disciplines people correctly acknowledge that there's a sweet spot of skill and experience that overlaps somewhere in your late 30s, 40s or even 50s, yet in software very often we recreate Lord of the Flies, leading to chaotic project management.

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Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47.

There is this constant infantilization of people where once you’re an adult you don’t think anyone younger than you is capable of anything. It’s a big problem that this has been creeping into how we treat people like children at continually older ages.

Nobody knows how to do things when they start doing them, and they won’t until they do start. Delaying this to an older age makes this harder not easier.

There were a lot of WW2 and Korea draftees in the workforce during the 50s and 60s. Their early adult life experiences were significantly different from that of today's Americans.

irrelevant.

> constant infantilization of people

So the solution to avoid infantilizing them is to organize through scrum, standups and sprints? :P (which is where the discussion started)

That said, it's fair to say that a lot of young people are capable of far more than contemporary culture (or management) recognizes.

If you read the OP, the word "sprint" is used in its less formal definition of "working long hours for an extended period of time", not in the formal description of an AGILE time-boxed work period.

do you have a very loosely defined goal in an uncertain environment? then, yes, try to adopt an iterative workflow.

This has never happened to me or anywhere I've worked (except see below) because we always had reasonably defined goals, maybe at the high-level only, but they were clear and we could work on them. Except for research projects you should have a pretty clear understanding of what's needed because business is a pretty dull, straightforward thing.

Okay, the exceptions: management failures. When them who should be doing their job are too fucking incompetent to pull their finger out of their arses. Years ago I worked at one place where they had 3 home-made frameworks floating around the company. A framework was clearly needed, management just dithered, so 3 different programmers just got on with it and did the necessary creation. Triple the work done, and an inevitable political war was brewing over which one would be used. And this was a medium sized company producing accounting software, not some inexperienced startup. Oh yes, I do have other stories like this... Crap management is a curse. It's always management IME. Fuckers seem to breed like rabbits too. Yes I am bitter.

GP was criticizing having entire teams including team leads who are too young to have much experience, when there are people around who do have that experience. How do you get from that to "Delaying this to an older age"?

> Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47.

That has absolutely nothing to do with "treating people like children at continually older ages"

Circa Apollo 11, the average age of the American population was 29. Today it is 38.

In addition to that, NASA had its budget increase over 1000% between 1960 and 1965, so it had to hire a lot of new people for doing something nobody had done before. That is a very different situation than in 2009, when its (inflation adjusted) budget was around half the peak and had been slowly declining for almost 20 years. You don't hire a lot of people in that situation, so your workforce automatically ages.

In 1965 Margaret Hamilton was in charge of all of the Command Module software for Apollo at the age of 29. It wasn’t just young underlings led by experienced engineers.

You two are arguing extremes. Nothing remarkable with a 29-year-old engineer leading a team of a few other engineers. (29 is a lot different than ~23)

Head of huge mission-critical project? Retired at forty? Nope.

> Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47.

I find this highly dubious because circa Apollo 11 the space program employed its largest workforce ever, including bazillions of mechanical engineers making nuts and bolts.

A more meaningful comparison would be what the average age of the managers and leadership are/were.

Mechanical engineers are not machinists. They help but don't actually do the production work.

It kind of makes sense. Space program was in its infancy, so I would also expect the workforce knowledgeable about space to be in its infancy, because it's not like there were experienced people putting satellites in orbit in the '20s, let alone an education pipeline for it. And those were back in the days when people got pensions and had loyalty to companies and whatnot.

By 2009 the industry was old enough to have people close to retirement age who had studied it in college.

>It’s a big problem that this has been creeping into how we treat people like children at continually older ages.

Isn't this a bit flimsy? Eventually, we'll treat all people younger as those who have room to grow -- isn't that to be expected? "like children" is relative.

I don’t understand how this comment relates to my tweet. I agree with you that nobody knows how to do anything and won’t until they start. That’s why you really want to spend some time working with highly experienced people, in whatever career you choose.

I’m not talking about some vague concept of “leadership”. Most of the experienced engineers I worked with on Chrome weren’t even officially “leads”. They were individual contributors just like me.

I’m talking about the nitty gritty day to day details of writing robust reliable software. Class or function here? How should I test this? How should we detangle this spaghetti code? What order should we conquer this bug list in?

If you want to make a good software product it’s best to have people on your team who have made many software products before successfully.

The education hurdle and objective goals of nasa also changed a lot

"Circa Apollo 11 the average age of a NASA engineer was 28. In 2009 it was 47."

That data point is from a 2006/2008 report^1; that data refers not only to NASA "engineers" but to all NASA "civil servants". It probably does not include the JPL as that is a NASA contractor, managed by Caltech. JPL employees are not civil servants.

After reading the 2006 report, as updated in 2008, I am having difficulty understanding how this single data point from 2006 is evidence of the "constant infantilization of people". Some further "evidence" would be appreciated to help me understand.

Below is how the report explains the age distribution of civil servants at NASA in 2006/2008. (This does not tell us what is the age distribution at NASA today. To get an idea of just how dated is this report, check out the quote the author pulls from the Strauss and Howe (2000) book titled Millennials Rising.^2)

"Even today, NASA has an extremely low attrition rate. With an average rate of 4.6% per year, the NASA workforce does not turn over very quickly.11 This rate is below NASAs own historical rate, far below the private sector rates, and even below those rates of other Federal Agencies.12

Most attrition comes from retirement-eligible employees. The attrition rate among Boomers in their forties is extremely low, about 1% per year and members of Generation X have about a 4% attrition rate. The Generation X attrition rate at NASA is lower than the Generation X attrition rate at all other Federal Agencies.

To fill critical positions, there has been a low level of full-time, permanent hiring at all times.13

Importantly, the demographics of this hiring have changed over time. Priority was given to fill critical positions to minimize gaps in core competencies, so the trend in hiring has been to hire older, more experienced workers who could best fill those gaps. This has meant that in 1993, NASA was hiring primarily members of the Boomer generation and in 2005 is still primarily hiring members of the Boomer generation.

1. http://web.archive.org/web/20091211095752if_/http://www.open...

2. "In obvious contrast, members of the Millennial generation tend to have starkly different views of employment and government.

Entry-level youths will be attracted to solid companies with career ladders and standardized pay and benefits. They will be less attracted to consulting, contracting, temping, freelancing, or new business startups. Millennials will be less inclined than Xers were at like age to take big career risks or turn their personal lives inside out to make more money.5"

Being a "tech lead" at Google is nothing like commanding a spaceship. It's more like being partially responsible for a team of 3-5 mid-20s engineers building the dashboard and reporting for space shuttle wind tunnel test results (or whatever they do with space shuttles).

Personally, I was a tech lead at Google pretty consistently from the ages of 26-35. I got better at it, and responsible for more, over time. It was a good learning experience for me and even when I was inexperienced at it, I was saving someone else some time.

Any advice for someone who just started as a tech lead at a new company? One of the devs interviewed for the spot but didn’t get it and is ten years older than me. It’s mostly younger Junior devs but I want to do a good job. Oh and it’s remote right now.

My plan so far is to take every engineer who is local out to lunch individually to get to know them, and encourage them to use the yearly education/convention stipend to get us all at a convention together later this year.

The main leap imo is you need to think about the project as a whole, not just your piece. You need to "see around corners" to identify anything (even if it's not technically under your purview) that could block the project, then raise the biggest stink necessary to fix it before it becomes a problem. Some lead devs do this naturally, some never seem to be able to.

Do not let your first project with a new company fail. You won't recover from that, even if it's not your fault in any way. Succeed and you will become known as a person who gets things done.

Also be a mentor to the other devs. But I assume you're already doing that if they hired you as a lead and based on your ideas.

I always did weekly 1:1s with everyone I was TLing, even when we were all in the office together 5 days a week. I never felt it was a waste of time. I'd let them set the agenda, and if they didn't have anything on their minds (rare), we'd just chat about whatever was going on in the broader team, their lives, whatever.

Figuring out people's strengths, interests, and where they need to grow is key. You want to give people projects that are going to help them grow by pushing them a little bit out of their comfort zone, but not too much, because you also want them to succeed. Someone on the team needs to work on presentation skills? Giving a presentation to 10 people is a good opportunity to learn from mistakes. But if the audience is 100, maybe don't set them up for that kind of failure. Someone wants to grow into a TL role? Encourage them to host an intern. Etc.

You also need to understand people's career goals. You might be an (in Google terms) L5 TL with two other L5s on the team and a couple L3-4s. Who wants to get promoted on which timeline? Should the high-impact, interesting L5 project go to the L4 who wants to get promoted, or to the L5 who doesn't care about getting promoted but just wants the most interesting project?

A lot of that sounds like manager stuff, I know. When you're a TL, your manager is your partner as well as your boss, because the two of you are working together to keep the team happy, productive, and successful. And you'll both have information and perspective the other doesn't.

Google has a great viral slide deck about how to take credit for things as a TL. It works better visually but I'll try anyway. Basically, if the project is to deliver a big square, the TL's job is to cut differently shaped pieces out for teammates to do based on their skill, interest, what will be a good growth challenge for them, etc. Then, as a TL, you do whatever scraps are left over (imagine cutting a big circle, a rectangle, and a smaller square out of a square). So the IC work you do might seem like weird odds and ends, but if you get the whole thing done and everyone on the team was happy and productive, you succeeded as a TL.

I interviewed at a YC startup recently and the founder was making ageist jokes to me because I was older than 25. Tech is literally insane regarding age. The assumption seems to be that once you get a single grey hair you can't use a computer any more? But I can tell you when I was writing code at like 18 or 20 everything I did was unsalvageable garbage.

It actually amazes me how much goes into writing quality code that is usable in production. I would be very surprised if any junior engineers could do it without messing up a bunch of stuff (which I certainly wouldn't fault them for as they're still learning!) You would need a good mentor if you wanted to avoid that I guess.

Now that I get old, I notice…

…that all this supposedly stable production code with tests and architecture is useless. because you throw away the stack entirely after 5-8 years, because the API has changed, because the tech is not fashionable, because the new SOC/PCI/Bale regulation mandates things that only exist in AWS.

Just hack the minimum together, speed of execution >> durability of the stack.

It is kind of odd considering how many of the technologies the modern world we still use were invented in the 70's by the proverbial grey beards.

I blame Silicon Valley VC's for this attitude - if you have not invented Facebook by the age of 18 then you are done for.

In the IDF (Israel's military) due to mandatory conscription there are plenty of young people in various leadership capacities. So yeah, you can be 19+, an officer, leading people into combat. Or flying a jet/cargo plane/helicopter. Or leading a software project.

That said, there are older people around in more senior roles and the way leaders act there is very structured but leaders are also expected to improvise when necessary.

It's somewhat amusing when you're dealing with those guys on some sort of technical collaboration. You might have a team from some big tech and then a bunch of "kids" in the room.

> So yeah, you can be 19+, an officer, leading people into combat.

More like 30+.

On average, conscripts are basically useless for the first three years. Only those on extended contacts can be (somewhat) relied upon.

> Or leading a software project.

Software engineering units use 5+ years extended contracts in addition to mandatory 3 years. Plus very heavy selection.

They also have explicit leadership training and military discipline. Most of the Israelis I met at TAU (post IDF) were much more disciplined and mature than even American grad students at similar ages. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Side note, sometimes I get “flashbacks” of my time in Israel and miss it. In those moments the US feels sorta like a surreal place detached from reality a bit too much. Silicon Valley/California is the worse for that.

I’m curious, which flashbacks do you have? What do you miss about Israel? If you want to share. I want to go there one day so I’m genuinely curious to know more about your experience. :)

It's really more like a "reverse" deja vu. It was my first time traveling overseas and experiencing a very different culture. Tel Aviv was also my first time living in a "major world metropolis". Many of the sites, sounds, smells, and people made a very strong impression (the mangos were just amazing). Tel Aviv's vaguely similar to a more edgy Miami with less mansions and more falafel.

Israel overall has a fascinating mix of different cultures from east and west (with no small amount of tension at times). Many of my assumptions about the world were shattered and your sense of history changes (for an American at least). I had an Austrian roommate and a Palestinian neighbor in the dorms. If you visit, definitely try to get off the beaten path, visit a Kibbutz, goto a Shabbat dinner, etc. Try and visit Jordan too!

Israeli's are generally a passionate lively people, but also serious and pragmatic. They can be... prickly too. It makes sense how Israel has so many startups and technology per capita -- lots of smart motivated people paired with discipline gained from IDF service.

There are 20 year olds who demonstrate fine leadership skills and maturity. There are plenty of 40 year olds who do not. Find the best people you can regardless of age.

Also, often times the only way to get that experience in the first place is to be put into the positions of leadership to develop your skills.

Ok, but what is the histogram on that? The point wasn't "someone young can't possibly do X" but a combination of "it seems strange that we have an industry built almost entirely of young people" and "somehow this industry believes old people can't do things". Maybe there is a good reason for this, but it is certainly strange: it is like we actively don't want experience that I would have thought should count for a lot (in architecture and planning) while demanding sometimes impossible amounts of experience in things that I'd think wouldn't matter at all (using the new, shiny framework or programming language that those truly experienced people are probably avoiding anyway unless it really really offered something they hadn't seen in their decades of development).

Part of it was the speed of advancement of tech - at the beginning there wasn't anyone available but the kids and by the time those kids were old enough to get into management/positions of leadership, they were graybeards and some new tech was the important thing and the only people using that were the kids.

We're finally getting to the point where there's not much "new" each year or decade, so it's starting to slow down again.

Uhm… I’ve seen the problems with people climbing the corporate ladder too fast.

I used to work with this person in his early 30ies and they were in charge of the infrastructure. This person started as a developer and then was tasked with managing infrastructure, while not having never actually worked as a sysadmin and/or having done operations work.

Well… after a while it became clear that the limitations of the infrastructure were a reflection of the limitations of this person’s knowledge and understanding of infrastructure.

Experience does matter.

This is a nice example of the Peter Principle. This person climbed the career ladder until they were no longer good at what they were doing.

"The rise and fall of Ryan Howard" (The Office)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc35afiM2f4

There are exceptionally talented 20 year olds. There are none with significant leadership experience.

The percentage goes up only marginally with age/experience, and that still doesn't keep cultures from hiring older people with zero experience into leadership roles. The culture specifically opts to select older individuals despite there being enough young people with natural leadership skills in contexts where both populations have no experience.

Appeal to age runs deep in our species.

I’m 45 now and over half my leadership experience was before 20.

You can run a fraternity, a marching band, a 800+ member charitable organization project before 20.

Maybe you’re a father? Own a flat? I’m 40, little CEO, father, house owner and voter, and it feels way to young to own any of these responsibilities ;) Man we have the world in our hands, what do we do now…

None is a bit bold. My college buddies (& lots of people in that peer cohort) founded companies in their 20s and I think they tended more often than not to demonstrate lots of maturity and leadership skills. Certainly more than some stories I’ve heard leaders of bigger tech companies.

Your parent said "leadership experience," and you responded with "leadership skill." I won't take sides, but I see people talking past each other.

Correct. I chose the words “significant” and “experience” deliberately.

My point still stands either way you interpret it. A 26 yold has had 4 years to build leadership skills at college (or even earlier) and another 4 in industry. That’s 8 years of experience which feels substantial. Think about it. There are kids who come out of high school with more coding experience because they got attracted to it at a very early age. There are also kids who do similar kinds of things around leadership.

I replied to the comment you wrote about “20 year olds”.

You can get experience without being in charge of something

I don't believe that 20 year olds with good leadership skills even exist.

Lafayette was a major general in the American revolution at 19, he had plenty of leadership skills in his 20’s. Not saying it’s _common_ but historically it seems at least possible.

A title is meaningless without context. Knowing he was a major general does not tell me anything about his leadership skills.

Often at companies (And I presume in other situations as well), people are thrust into higher level positions purely because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and someone above them left.

I’m saying he had the skills because after he was thrust into the position, he lead military operations, then left for France to convince them to contribute more to the American revolution (which they did). Maybe that doesn’t count as true leadership to you but I know it would clear the bar at any company I worked at.

Realizing how often people exaggerate their own abilities and working in a "good" company seeing how Senior+ devs operate, I no longer trust any claim of someones skill unless it's by someone who I already trust or there is sufficient context and evidence to support the claim.

Too many people/companies claiming to be "world class" or whatever when they are above average at best.

I have no knowledge of Lafayette (Not American) and no context or understanding what he did, so my default judgement is that his skill is exaggerated.

I'm not American, but Lafayette was certainly successful at achieving his military and political goals.

It's worth noting he had been trained in a French military academy for officers since 11, and was commissioned as an officer in the French Musketeers at 14.

Additionally he was extremely well connected in the French nobility and clearly had the expectation that men would follow him.

As for his leadership capabilities, Washington cited him in a letter to congress when he was still officially an adviser for rallying US troops during a retreat after being shot in the leg. His record is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_...

Sounds like I'm likely to be wrong in this case then :).

I’m pretty sure Lafayette had been training for this since he was around 12-13 years old.

Did you ever play sports as a child? It’s clear even in kids under the age of 10 that some people have natural leadership skills and some don’t.

I played sports at a relatively competitive level for a long time. I do not remember seeing players with significant leadership ability.

Maybe this is true on a relative scale (E.g. good leadership skills for their age), but I don't believe it's true on an absolute scale and an absolute scale is the only useful scale in a professional environment.

I also believe that leadership skill is domain-specific, so having significant experience in your domain along with good leadership skills (Real skills, not from courses or workshops or whatever) does not at all seem feasible by the age of 20.

A person with leadership skills can still benefit from experience.

My current company is lead by someone with good leadership skills, and successfully managed a commercial team. Now he's trying to lead a company, and it is clear that he does not have the necessary experience to make the correct decisions.

Just wanted to point out at JPL there are many 25-year-old people commanding spaceships, rovers, and landers. Sometimes room-fulls of them. Not a great example.

Yeah, I was "flight software" on a control shift for a Dragon space capsule when I was 26, and the "mission director" was probably a year or two younger than me. Other shifts had older directors though.

Flight software is a fun role because they're the first person anyone asks when something goes wrong. "What's causing that sensor to glitch out, is it a bug?" "Uh no, probably not. Hey I'm just a software engineer, but is it possible the pyrowhatzit is actually melting right now?" "Oh crap"

There were teenage lieutenants and commanders (of ships) in their 20’s in the Royal Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Even a sixth rate ship had well over 100 men on board and smaller, unrated ships could have a complement of about 100.

I do think there are lots of advantages from experience, both on the technical side and with organising teams but I don’t think it’s totally crazy for young people to sometimes be very useful and productive. Plenty of the companies YC funds are founded/run by people in their (often early) 20’s and some end up being managed well and others poorly. If it were the case that young people so obviously weren’t able to do it, I would expect YC would have changed their behaviour by now.

Isn't the main reason just that failures in the vast majority of software aren't that bad? Like if you build a bad house it could collapse and kill someone. If you build a bad calendar app/email client/text editor it might... be a bit difficult to use? Crash sometimes?

And then people wont use it because it's bad and your company will go under, problem solved. Some other 20 year old (or 40 year old) flying by the seat of their pants who happens to be good at development will step in and build something that works.

Obviously if you're building medical device firmware, or aircraft control systems or whatever then it's a whole different story. But generally companies building that sort of thing do have a much more systematic and dedicated approach to quality. And there are industry regulations that enforce that.

If you build a bad email / calendar app user emails and meeting info might leak, and cause harm.

And still there are so many leak of personal infos and startup X having been hacked and Y millions of data about personal infos and account infos being leak in the dark web. But like nobody really care. It does a few articles in tech news and some tweets and that’s it. (Now I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s bad but the millions of people around me don’t think it is)

Seniority doesn’t change a lot here:

- Sure, a senior might not use that NPM package coming from Zorglub89 on the internet, but then they’ll also execute slowly because of the hurdles of checking for these packages.

- Sure, a senior will perform external security audits regularly, but a lot of seniors are also in it for money or career and will be rogue.

IT has systemic leakage of PII.

> Like, would you ever expect a 25 year old guy to command a spaceship?

Charles Darwin was in his early 20s, and the captain of the Beagle was only a few years older, when they blasted off to sea to do their surveys.

Lifespan were much shorter than now ???. In your middle 20's you were practically middle age already.

In most wars until comparatively recently it was common to have 25yos in charge of 100s to 1000s of men, including on occasion general officer rank. Even with modern peacetime career trajectories it is possible to have a 25yo captain commanding a company of ~200 soldiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Bradford

99% of software cannot collapse and kill you if it is built incorrectly.

In fact, this idea that incompetent people have never built buildings before is just wrong. There are plenty of examples from history of unqualified people somehow being given the job of constructing something that then collapses killing dozens of people.

There is some safety critical software and I hope that that is written by experienced people. But basically all buildings are safety critical.

Google "tofu dreg construction" to see just how bad modern construction can get.

Mark Zuckerberg summed up the Valley ethos at age 22, when he told a Stanford audience, “Younger people are just smarter.”

This sums up the arrogance of the youth. I wonder how he views his own comments now.

From 41,000 feet in a Gulfstream G650ER?

Although, I believe that info is now out-of-date and I don't want to engage in celebrity stalking behavior. Let him have his happiness. I honestly don't begrudge it.

I'm blessed down here to be sitting through stories about living the one life you have, right?

I'm more curious about what 20something Zuckerberg would think about his comments if he could somehow see current Zuckerberg.

I wonder what he thinks of that claim now that he's pushing 40.

> We would never accept this in other fields. Would you live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their late 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would you drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?

I find that observation interesting. I can actually tell, when reading about project failures, that no one with any real-world experience had a hand in it. Someone came up with a hare-brained idea, froze out anyone who would dare to say "yeah...but," and went full-throttle.

I mean, I wouldn't bet my life or savings on it. But sometimes it is amazing to watch what some dedicated people can achieve at full throttle, even if/when they make mistakes.

Agreed, but mistakes at full throttle are called, in the vernacular, "disasters."

> Like, would you ever expect a 25 year old guy to command a spaceship?

Genghis Khan was 20 when he started assembling his army. You can have leadership at any age. Some organisations such as the military bring in young people to directly be leaders. You need to look at people's ability, not their age.

apparently according to Google most Mongol leaders died in their 30s, the demographics in the Golden Horde were somewhat different than today. The guy who leads the Taliban in his 20s isn't exactly the Mozart of terrorism, it's just a dangerous job. More importantly comparing world historical figures to your average modern day senior project manager is kind of wild. Everyone in the software industry may think they're Alexander the Great, but they're likely not. Most senior military staff is also old.

What I'm saying is obviously that if you looked at merit, on average, software teams should be older than they are, not that it's physically impossible to have a good leader who is young.

if you have that much merit in tech at 30/40 and not working pro bono, you already have enough money to retire, or work on whatever you want/own your own company, instead of slaving away for a megacorp.

Temujin was a nothingburger of a warlord until he was nearly 40.

What did he learn in those 20 years that made him Genghis Khan?

I think the employees in their 20s are valued because they have the time and the energy to "power through". They work hard and party harder. But this powering through results in things that, yes, work, but are engineer-hostile and hard to maintain. They also quantitatively produce more output, useful or just overly complicated.

Us fossils think more before we do anything, because we ain't got all life, and we definitely want to keep it as simple as possible, as we don't want to be getting calls after dinner time - at 6PM :)

> Yet in software you have these weekly "I'm 40, is my life over" posts.

I'm not sure, I feel like on average there's a decrease of openness/neuroplasticity or call it whatever you want with age: people sometimes get set in their ways, choose approaches that worked for them in the past and will be less likely to jump into new technologies as often - having families and other life responsibilities (and having a better ability to balance life and work) will lead to a bit less exploration.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, and even then the premise isn't set in stone, but I'd say that you sometimes exchange the desire to jump into bleeding edge technology and innovative solutions for picking approaches that have minimized risks and are more likely to work out long term, a bit like: https://boringtechnology.club/

Not to say that either is better than the other, there is definitely a lot of merit in having experience and having worked on lots of systems in the past. I just wish that the industry itself didn't move ahead so fast and we focused more on the quality of what we have: e.g. more like PostgreSQL, rather than the new seasonal NoSQL database, or looking at React after a few months and finding it pretty different already.

Biases in hiring, of course, are likely to just make the conditions worse for everyone. Ideally, you'd have a mix of engineers of different seniority, that could successfully collaborate and learn from each other. Disclaimer: the biases in my own post might be construed as ageism in of itself, though I'm also kind of speaking of my own experience - as I gradually age, my focus shifts towards building rather than exploring.

Late 20s is not that young for a carpenter.

Pretty common for someone to leave school at 16 and be done with their apprenticeship at 20.

The constitution was signed by 20-somethings

e.g. James Monroe (18), John Marshall (20), Aaron Burr (20), Alexander Hamilton (21), and James Madison (25)

First, those are the ages of those men at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The Constitution was not ratified until nearly 15 years later.

Second, none of the people you listed signed the Declaration.

The average age of the Declaration signers was 41; only 3 were younger than 30.

I am afraid you have an unreliable source. The Constitution was ratified by the states, not signed by delegates. At the time of ratification, the average age of the delegates was 42. James Madison, for example, was born in 1751 and was 36 years of age in 1787. Alexander Hamilton was born four years later and was 31 in 1787. There were only four delegates in their twenties.

Humans have been on the earth for 300 millennia.

If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40 for the last 2,000 years.

So for 99.33% of human history the ONLY leaders we had were under 30.

> If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40 for the last 2,000 years.

That's not... that's not how statistics work work at all.

Life expectancy was 30 because half of all babies died, and on top of that childhood diseases took out a bunch more. Eliminating this has been the vast majority of life expectancy increase.

If you made it to puberty in antiquity, you were pretty likely to make it to 60 or so. Y'know... assuming you didn't live in an area the Romans or Mongols wanted.

Do you have any sources on that? It l that's an interesting way to look at it. I would have expected life expectancy to be way lower than you suggest by your calculations. (IE: 9/13 babies died*, with 60 as full life, meaning 18 yrs expectancy).

* All I know is that humans used to produce a lot of babies because a lot of them would die, but my googling sucks

Lots to read at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy such as:

Until the middle of the 20th century, infant mortality was approximately 40–60% of the total mortality. Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years.

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