Why More Companies Are Recognizing the Benefits of Keeping Older Employees
longevity.stanford.eduI'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(
as you say, cutthroat
Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867010
Only keeping, or hiring too? Need a job, HN. Though I don't do MS Teams, haha.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
This seems to be arguing that they should more than showing that they increasingly are.
Also the bit about companies with more older workers performing better, and the bit about older people often losing jobs due to layoffs, sound like they could also fit together as high firm performance permitting long tenure rather than having to show only that experienced employees cause higher firm performance (although of course the examples demonstrate the latter via other means, so it can't be that it doesn't happen at all).
[delayed]
The article is so comprehensive it’s hard to comment on all of it.
I think the idea of making physical workplaces better accessible for older people also benefits the young as well. So many companies just assume “oh hey our factory workers/laborers are strong dudes they can handle XYZ repetitive task no problem.”
But really, you’re just making everyone less productive.
I also think that companies underestimate the quality loss they get when they refuse to cultivate an environment that employees who have the wisdom of older age and perhaps more options to go elsewhere will tolerate.
9/9/6 burnout shops chase away families with kids and older employees who know the value of time and bias themselves toward inexperience, working harder not smarter, and a general lack of diversity in life experience.
There’s an interesting reluctance to make things more efficient which I’ve seen in friends/family lately. Every time, it boggles the mind.
For example, I spent the better half of a Sunday making my Nespresso machine easier to use. I moved the pods from a zipped bag in a drawer to a 3D-printed holder on the side of the cabinet. I made a similar holder for some disposable coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, now I finally use the machine I paid good money for. Yet, my family recoiled. “You’re so lazy you can’t just open the drawer?”, and other similar sentiments were repeated.
Life is about friction and incentives. Make the good things easier to do (put vegetables in nice containers in an easy-to-see part of the fridge) and the bad things harder to do (charge your phone in another room to avoid using it in bed).
This is all to say, however much willpower you think you have in a day, you have less than that. And you should spend your time building a life where the tired, exhausted version of you can do great things. The same applies to businesses. Design a business effectively, and lazy/tired/stressed employees will still be able to contribute.
In my experience, friction is greatly underestimated, both as a tool and as an obstacle. I've been able to pick up multiple new positive habits just by reducing the friction involved in doing them to a minimum.
Nevermind that society dictates everyone must work to survive by default.
Nevermind that work has become significantly more precarious, the cost of living higher, the wages lower.
Ageism is just a dick move in general. It's gotten to the point where job candidates in their 30s and early 40s are dropping work history and education to appear as if they're in their 20s to potential employers - and even considering plastic surgery[1]. It's gotten completely out of control, but I'm quite glad to see more of my peers and younger colleagues taking a firm stance against it in any form.
As long as the work gets done, everything else is irrelevant. As long as the idea is successful, it doesn't matter the age of the person who surfaced it.
Stereotyping just gets your ass into legal trouble, and the easiest solution is to just not do it in the first place.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennia...
Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge. Even the best documentation doesn't cover every edge case.
It's not just the management.
Younger workers as well.
I speak from my own experience from both sides of the table, now of course at the receiving end of the under appreciation.
> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.
they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.
What are your thoughts on the usefulness of tribal knowledge when older (age-wise) employees change jobs? [0]
Then, the tribal knowledge they had at their previous place of employment won't be as useful somewhere else. Though I suppose you can make an argument that they might have similar workflows, or tools, or they might just have general experience that would be useful.
But I suppose your comment was more on the under-appreciation by management of existing tribal knowledge in a team.
[0] Perhaps out of necessity, e.g: company went under, or maybe they want a change of pace.
While I'm not sure that we should encourage the continuation and growth of tribal knowledge, it is incredibly unwise to not recognize that:
- it exists (and will always exist) - knowing it is *vital* - maintaining ways of spreading it is *also* vitalI didn’t read the comment you replied to in that way. I read it as, edge cases can be gnarly and the most thorough of documentation and process will never capture them all.
It’s just the truth, tribal knowledge comes from experience in the trenches and what a new hire could take weeks to discern from perfect documentation and old timer may know off the cuff.
That’s the reality of enterprise software. Especially in big tech where scale is massive and theoretical solutions aren’t always the best choice for “reasons”.