I liked Woody Allen's answer to the question why he was still working in his late seventies:
You know in a mental institution they sometimes give a person some clay or some basket weaving? It’s the therapy of moviemaking that has been good in my life. If you don’t work, it’s unhealthy—for me, particularly unhealthy. I could sit here suffering from morbid introspection, ruing my mortality, being anxious. But it’s very therapeutic to get up and think, Can I get this actor; does my third act work? All these solvable problems that are delightful puzzles, as opposed to the great puzzles of life that are unsolvable, or that have very bad solutions. So I get pleasure from doing this. It’s my version of basket weaving.
This isn't just true for old people or mental unhealthy but for everybody. Having no troubles in life can become the biggest trouble of your life. If you are involved in some work, you have some troubles, or busy solving some problems a great deal of smaller problems in life just come and go without you giving a bid deal about it. If you have nothing to do, you will pick faults every single thing, you may pick fights with family members on sorts of silly issues. And things really get ugly from there.
And most importantly lets not forget working is one of the best ways to network with people, meet them, share your stories- this ensures a lot of your stress and anxiety gets a means to be vented out. Else alone, every things builds up in a pressure cookers and bursts real ugly some day.
Since that line of reason (which is a good one!) tends to be brought up when it comes to basic income, or "end of the age of scarcity" discussions, let me just add to this:
None of this depends on the current social contract of money seeking work (employment, contractors, ...).
It's perfectly possible to do meaningful work with meaningful social interactions when no money is changing hands and no threat of starvation is looming over people.
I had two months of severance recently, and most people I told about it said "man, I'd go crazy with nothing to do" but I pretty much didn't stop doing things the entire two months.
I made progress on most of the books I was reading. I did a lot of coding. I read research papers. I ended up driving up the ohio river with a friend who was applying for jobs at the lock and dams. I never got bored and I always had something to do.
It appears that some people just aren't very good at that. I don't exert some special force of will, so I can't really act superior. I just naturally want to read and learn about a lot of random stuff. I wonder if it's impulsive, driving curiosity that keeps some people active well into old age. I have plans to "retire" some day, but when I say "retire" I mostly mean "to stop being dependent on a specific income stream while I continue to do a lot of stuff"
" Did you know that the first Matrix was
designed to be a perfect human world
where none suffered, where everyone
would be happy? It was a disaster. No one
would accept the program. Entire crops
were lost. Some believed that we lacked
the programming language to describe
your "perfect world". But I believe that, as
a species human beings define their
reality through misery and suffering. So
the perfect world was a dream that your
primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake
from. "
―Agent Smith to Morpheus
A shorter version is "My work is engaging and fun, and I can choose my own pace".
If Allen was in a physical trade, his body might no longer be up to it. If he was in menial work, retirement would be more engaging - few factory workers or street cleaners would consider their work 'basket weaving'.
> few factory workers [...] would consider their work 'basket weaving'.
I had the pleasure of working with a machinist named Bill who was probably 70 years old. He was an artist with tools twice as old as I was, sometimes five times that. After decades of experience there were no doubts about his products, no mistakes. He even included ergonomic touches not specified in the plans so that people using his products as tools downstream would have less chance of mistakes themselves.
When asked about some of the other people working in the factory, mostly 20-somethings, he said, "They are strong, but they have no finesse."
Bill was a 10x employee, and he wove the hell out of those baskets.
Strongly agree. A blueprint is a Platonic puzzle -- Here, take this representation of an ideal and figure out some way of making it a physical reality.
I am currently reading "Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity" [0].
The author starts with the observation that in the world of fine art, it seems that the artists who encountered great success are divided into 2 broad groups: the ones who had a clear vision (often groundbreaking) of what they wanted to accomplish, did it while they were young, peaking early (Young Geniuses); and the ones whose approach was more iterative, built upon theory and learning, who never stopped improving over their lifetime, and whose vision was established over decades (Old Masters).
To support this thesis, he looks at concrete data: for example, for the artists whose paintings sold for the most money, at what age did they paint the works which would later sell for the most? Or, to use an alternative method of approximating "success" - for the works that are most often included in art textbooks, at what age were they painted by their authors? [1] He goes over several measures of "success" in this way, and the data maps pretty well with the commonly accepted wisdom for each artist (e.g. Picasso peaked early, and his later works are nowhere as remembered as his earlier stuff, while Cézanne took a lifetime to build his approach and vision).
He then looks into what those artists had to say about their processes, and how that relates to those findings; and he then explores this thesis beyond just the world of fine art.
It's a fairly dense read - especially if, like me, you have very little knowledge of fine art (in which case I recommend looking up the works as you read the book, even if it doubles your reading time) - but it's extremely enlightening. Highly recommended.
There's probably no big mystery behind this. For most folks the 30's would be when their number of dependent offspring capable of bipedal motion peaked.
The author of this article, Lewis Lapham [1], is himself quite accomplished at 79, and founded the magazine, Lapham's Quarterly [2], which might appeal to some HN readers.
It's a testament to his thesis on Old Masters and Second Acts that you cite his founding of Lapham's Quarterly instead of him being the editor of Harper's for almost forty years.
Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died working, at the age of 104 years. 2 years before his death he was visited by a Brazilian journalist, for an interview. After he knew the journalist was in his late 50s he commented:
"Oh, so young! You got your whole life in front of you!"
And also Esther M. Conwell, semiconductor physicist and recipient of the National Medal of Science. She's still publishing and mentoring grad students at 92.
Don't fool yourself, these people are amazing, but hey are outliers. While i understand that many people here aspire to be like this and you should, realistically speaking these people have been very lucky.
Most people 80+ either have trouble walking, hearing, seeing, thinking (or any combination combined). It's longer than the average lifespan, so that these people can still do their work in a meaningful way is a godsend.
Sure, you can do a lot with a healthy lifestyle, but still there are limits to your genes, or life could take unexpected turns every second.
My uncle, 62 years old, CEO of a bank, who was always healthy and fit just had a stroke and is now wheelchair bound and does not know which year it is. Meanwhile, his brother (my dad), has been smoking his whole life and not exercised for decades but is still fine. he probably won't get to 80 though, and he knows that.
I have to initially suspect that this difference between the genders has at least something to do with the fact that often -- particularly in the eras of the currently elderly -- the "work" of a female extended well beyond the office and into the household. Retirement may end the office duties, but the household duties will continue.
he is suggesting it as an explanation for retirement contributing to premature death in men more than in women, not the difference in life expectancy in general.
It is hard to determine the causal relationship; I think it goes in both directions: those who are closer to death are more likely to retire and those who retire are more likely to die sooner.
> Finally, we nd some evidence in line with the view that involuntary early retirement has a negative
impact on health, but not necessarily voluntary early retirement.
Reminds me of the story Merlin Mann tells about the butcher who when asked what trick he uses to know that he picked up exactly a pound of meat responds "Be a butcher for 20 years".
That's kung fu, and it's extremely satisfying to cultivate it in everything you do. I've been inspired to learn how to do stuff like that since I saw a chef drop ingredients into a recipe without measuring.
Dr. Jerry Cox is 89, leads his latest startup[1], remains a sr. cs professor @WashU[2], sold a company he co-founded (Growth Networks) for >$355M to Cisco in 2000, and is generally smart and inspiring. Also sat for a formal oral history focused on his contributions to biomedical computing[3].
He sounds a little like the former president of the company I work for (President is higher than CEO over here).
He was extremely hardworking, wise and smart, he knew the business in and out, but he was pretty much set in his ways and did not delegate, and was hampering the company's growth (many of this kind of people try to keep their company manageable by themselves).
He ended up being overthrown by a brilliantly executed palace coup (by a sociopath, but I digress), but he would have stayed until his death if left to his own decision.
Actually, for some of the most driven workaholics, being retired is kind of a death sentence, it really does shorten their lives (most, being old, don't adapt to change well).
My father is still young, but I'm betting he's going to do the same (he is the head of a law firm), and I'm glad not to have followed his career, he's going to cast a shadow over his potential successors for decades.
My grandfather is cut from the same cloth, at 87 he still still farms and does hard physical labor. He's slowed down and is semi-retired but he golfs nearly every day when not working (carries his own bag for 18 holes). Retirement isn't an option for some people...
Sounds like someone who's whole life revolves around their work. Of course, if your whole life is about work, then it will only be finalized by perishing.
One Great example for above will be Jiri One:
A Japanese Master chef for shushi, I would say if there is only one documentary you will see this month. Let it be this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi
I found Jiro's son to be the more interesting character. The way he talks about being raised in the shadow of a master and choosing to follow in his father's footsteps is touching.
I thought Robert Caro would belong on this list. He amazes me, having written over the course of five decades two seminal books, both of which earned Pulitzer prizes. But he's "only" 79.
If you have been doing something all your life and you enjoy doing it why stop?
However, the question I have been struggling with lately has been: how do you pick up something new later on in life?
If you start to learn basket-weaving at 40, you are not going to be a great basket-weaver.
If you start programming at 40, you are not going to become Bill Joy or Fabrice Bellard, sorry. (counterexamples in any field welcome)
Your 10k hours count for much less at 40 than at 15. That guy(Danplan) who started golfing to become a Pro at 28 is slowly starting to find that out despite his progress.
So you have to pick your fights very carefully, if you are a chess master you can probably become a decent shogi or go player and vice versa.
If you have a solid foundation in math, you can probably do decent physics work at 40.
However, and this is what worries me, if your art in grade 5 was dismal, are you going to be able to get decent at 40?
That one lady in article sold her first painting at 89, but the question is whether she took up painting late in life or was that just a lucky fluke. (selling != enjoying painting)
> If you start to learn basket-weaving at 40, you are not going to be a great basket-weaver.
Sometimes just learning things is the goal. E.g. I'm learning German in my free time (as a new hobby) and surely I will never be a great german speaker/writer but then I don't aspire to be. Maybe I will have a use for it later, maybe not.
If you focus too much on the prize rather than what interests you and makes you happy doing it, you will lose the motivation to get started because it is easy to dismiss everything by saying "why bother I'm never going to be that great now"
That ten thousand hours thing is bullshit. You can become great at something in far less time with intelligent, focused practice. You may not be the complete expert, but you can achieve great things in that field. Stop imposing these limitations on yourself and just go out and learn something.
Everybody's art sucks in grade 5. It's very rare for a good artist to be good as a child. It's entirely developed from practice. 2-4 years of art school can take crappy amateurs and turn them into skilled professionals, whether they're 17 or 47.
I'm going to guess you're either around 20 and just don't know many people who took up new pursuits in their later years, or that you're late 50s and haven't seen peers put the same amount of effort they put in when they were in their 20s.
Most of the 15, 20 year olds I know who are _good_ at something are almost obsessive about it. It's not just that they're young, it's that they're really hard workers.
In fact I am neither, I am in my early 40s and thus my question.
I too was obsessive about certain things(programming, chess) at that age.
My problem is that this is not enough anymore when you are older. Even if you have all the time in the world, you will not be able to improve as much as some 15 year old in a year of intense study. So it goes.
I do not want to get bad at something, I want to get decent at something that would help people be it basket-weaving, or teaching German philosophy from original German texts.
My pet theory for some time has been that in order to achieve something significant in some field, you must have done a lot of deliberate practice before reaching certain age.
So some talent, lots of hard work and age < 20(25) are necessary conditions. The age part has mostly been ignored, while hard work part has been emphasized.
My favourite examples are two woodworkers who I admire greatly, Sam Maloof and James Krenov. Maloof was still making his rockers at 94, maybe a bit slower but not much.
Krenov sadly lost much of his eyesight in his late 80s so stopped making cabinets. But he continued to make planes, because he could make them by feel.
One note: not all retirement is necessarily sitting in front of the tv waiting to die. My grandfather is 81, and he and his wife are very active RVers. They travel around the country, hike, go four wheeling in their jeep. He seems about as happy as the people in the article.
The man is one of the most celebrated architects in the history of the field, and he created his masterwork (Fallingwater) when he was 71. Furthermore, his output over the last 20 years of his life accounted for more than half of his lifetime output. He died while in the middle of creating the Guggenheim - simply did not stop.
Interestingly enough his life arc was quite similar to Steve Jobs.
10k hours playing basketball isn't going to make you a professional basketball player, but I would imagine 10k hours painting, writing, or doing many other professional endeavors will certainly help you to earn a livable wage if not excel in your field.
James Altucher had a great spin on it. He says that maybe it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but with only 1000 hours, you can get pretty good. And that only takes a year of fitting it in for 20 hours a week. Even 100 hours of practice at any particular skill will make you better at it than most people, and you can do that in like 2 hours a week for 6 months. If you feel like mastering it after that, go for it, but if you frame it as "I can have a new skill after about 6 months of practice" instead of "I can be a master in 10 years of super hard work", you're a lot more likely to try it.
I'm surprised no one has considered how older aged workers fit in the software engineering industry. From my experience it seems like the older you get, the less viable you are.
The more we talk about this and chat it over, and the more experienced I get, the more convinced I become that this is all an accident of the fact that in order to be a 30-year software developer you have to have started 30 years ago, and 30 years ago the industry was simply much smaller than it is today.
I'm not saying we've necessarily got age-ism licked and there will certainly be residual prejudice that outlasts the original stimulus for it in the first place, but I think this is problem that will naturally fade over time, as the profession literally grows up.
Part of what makes me say this is that at 35, while I am no more capable of knowing all the Javascript frameworks as anybody else, there's no longer much about them that surprises me. You haven't lived as a developer until you talk to a young developer just starting with, say, Angular, telling them you've never used it, asking them about some problem that such binding frameworks tend to have, getting a blank stare, and then two weeks later getting an email about how they weren't noticing the problem up to that point but by golly it's there. I won't say there's nothing new under the sun, but the frantic churn of the programming world is really just the same set of ideas being endlessly recombined and refined... actually new ideas are much rarer. Keeping up is much easier than it looks when you've only got two or three years of experience.
I don't think this is exclusive to software engineer.
In most professions with a technical aspect, the majority coast through most of their career simply applying with what they learned in college and in their 20s. Far fewer spend a considerable amount of energy not only applying what they've learned already, but also digging deeper into the fundamentals and staying on top of new developments in their field. It is this latter group who simply become more and more valuable over time, while the skills and abilities of the former group becomes less and less relevant with each passing year.
Basically, it boils down to a majority that learns a trade and a minority that learn how to learn.
The key to changing this is to change our educational system to one where teachers focus on learning as the primary skill being taught. The maker movement most closely embodies a culture that values learning to learn.
I'm not even 30 and I feel like my skills are in decline. I can cover it up with experience - I know the libraries and tools and how to use them, and that can make you 100x faster. But I'm getting set in my ways after seeing what does and doesn't work so many times, and I'm losing the ability to just do something without thinking it through.
You are becoming more valuable (in the sense of being able to deliver more absolute value). But you are becoming less of a commodity, which means employers are also becoming less of a commodity for you.
To prepare for the future, you need to look into marketing yourself "wholesale" (that is, sell completed projects rather then into a team), and/or establish a network of people who care about fundamentals and not the latest hotness.
I turned down a hadoop job awhile ago, because it was hurting me to do things so stupidly. (I managed to do the same thing on C at 1/10 of the time on one machine as the project did on 10 machines using Hadoop, but they insisted that "hadoop is the thing"). If I was hungry for food, I might just deal with these pains. I'm obviously less employable right now than I was in my 20s when I was happy to use any stupid technology - but I'm happier for it.
IMO a more likely explanation is that because you have more experience, you are becoming more aware of your limitations--limitations that have been there all along, but you didn't notice them when you were younger.
> I'm losing the ability to just do something without thinking it through.
You still have that ability, but now you understand the risks of doing things that way, so you're reluctant to do so.
I agree with the other comments. A person with the ability to do something before thinking it through is called a "junior engineer". A senior engineer is someone who thinks it through. A distinguished engineer knows when it's not even worth thinking about it :-)
I think there are multiple factors at play to make it seem worse than it is:
The field has grown so fast that there are relatively few "old programmers" still.
And a portion of older people will appear "less viable" because a portion will be plagued by deteriorating health.
Then you have another portion who have been "kicked upstairs" into management because in many companies that's the only career path if you care about continuing to increase your income etc.
So the proportion of healthy, high performing, highly skilled older people who have remained in software engineering is likely really tiny.
I don't doubt that there are places where there are biases against older workers in software, but personally I've only ever interviewed one older software developer, and I hired him right away and to date, ten years on, he remains one of the best developers I've worked with.
Jesus, you go and try to make a generality and end up butchering it with the worst example you could have ever developed.
Baseball? Really? Why not make an analogy about how the lack of old MMA fighters is somehow telling about the global warming while you're at it.
Not to mention that your generality will fall apart with just one data point to oppose it - which is guaranteed to exist -, while one data point for it is next to useless.
At 57 with 33 years experience I still love writing code at the highest level. Current work is in iOS and node.js (thinking of Meteor). My experience of viability is different from yours ;-)
I am 42 and I am retired - and loving it. It means I have all the time in the world for doing things I really like, instead of staring at stock market charts all day long.
Unfortunately, writing programs isn't an occupation for old people.
EDIT: To be more precise, I cannot image that I will write a program after my retirement. To me, writing ephemeral programs is the opposite of the artful activities described in the article.
Programming can be gruntwork. Programming can be highly disciplined engineering. Programming can be math. Programming can be artistic expression.
The beauty and curse of working with bits is that they're as flexible as you want them to be.
Programming satisfies part of my desire for artistic expression. I don't plan on quitting until I'm dead - I'm more passionate about computing, from high level abstractions and algorithms down to individual lines of code, at 39 than I was at 19 or 29. And I know a lot of people older than I who are way better than I am, and just as gung-ho as they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I don't think it's true, but I believe the programs your write for leisure and those you may have to write for work may be quite different. In fact, in some line of software work you rarely have to write whole programs.
You know in a mental institution they sometimes give a person some clay or some basket weaving? It’s the therapy of moviemaking that has been good in my life. If you don’t work, it’s unhealthy—for me, particularly unhealthy. I could sit here suffering from morbid introspection, ruing my mortality, being anxious. But it’s very therapeutic to get up and think, Can I get this actor; does my third act work? All these solvable problems that are delightful puzzles, as opposed to the great puzzles of life that are unsolvable, or that have very bad solutions. So I get pleasure from doing this. It’s my version of basket weaving.