print“How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” That, I am told, is a standard inquiry Taiwanese engineers make about their American counterparts in hardware engineering. Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, the Chinese know that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech group means that problems will be solved. Black hairs are unlikely to do much more than talk a good game.
The Chinese respect experience, and for good reason. It’s a fact of life that experience, so often discounted in the American workforce for fresh-faced fools, gets things done, as it has grappled with problems for longer than inexperience.
UPDATE I: Contemplationist: You might wish to refer to the post. I spoke very specifically about hardware engineers being mostly older (naturally, the field is more demanding, aka less “fun,” and thus draws fewer Millennials). However, even your exuberant, MTV-type assessment of the software field is likely also refutable, colored by a few high-profile personalities and celebrities.
UPDATE II: Contemplationist is confusing a science fair with the work place where real design is done; where the playthings that keep America’s young, twittering twits’ brainwaves from flatlining are designed. My own sources, as some of you know, work deep in the belly of the beast that makes the gadgets that Contemplationist is vaporizing about. What Contemplationist seems to be describing resembles the science fair CNN’s Soledad O’Brien once attended, where American kids, hopped-up on self-esteem, were pressing buttons, and creaming in showy enthusiasm. The “designs” they were praised to the heavens for amounted to cheap, made-in-China circuits, purchased online and stuck into cool-looking “robots.” Of course, from Soledad’s descriptions you’d think this was some kind of scientific Second Coming.
Color me skeptical.
UPDATED III (April 27): Generation Jobless.
UPDATE IV (1/1/021): Old White Guys.
This is news? The Chinese, unlike the American competition, know that the best engineers are older White Men. Nokia’s mobile division, dumped by Microsoft, was vacuumed up by … ? And who invented the cool stuff that launched America as an industrial might?
I find somewhat in between. Older farts like me have experience and perspective that the younger guys lack – but the younger guys are often more up on later technology.
However, some of the older guys can’t see that things have changed over the span of years and never adjust their thinking. One needs to strike the right balance to avoid inflexibility or faddishness (where everyone follows some latest fad which, contrary to the opinion du jour, does NOT solve everything!).
Well, yesterday, a group with 3 different laboratory divisions and two independent private companies collaborated to assemble a research proposal – so wish me luck!
[Good luck, Myron. But I actually don’t believe you. With your IQ, it’s only liberalism that makes you accept that you are inadequate b/c of age. Some obeisance to the party-line.]
Myron, you are partially correct but Ilana’s assertion that Americans are over impressed with youth and useless credentials is only too accurate. I can remember being on the job market and enduring interviews with handsome youths, half my age with the correct ties and the correct hair cuts and the correct MBAs from the correct schools and they couldn’t pour piss out of a boot. My dad used to lament that he would trade two MBAs for a good used car salesman any day. I concur.
This is completely ridiculous. Have you ever been at a start-up meeting? A workshop? A hackathon? There are 19-21 year olds doing amazing things in technology and design out there. I suggest you venture forth from your cloistered world and go to some of these events for observation. You will be amazed at the level of dedication to finishing and doing hard work.
James
You are right about MBAs. However in computer tech, young males 18-29 are the leading builders and innovators. Anyone who thinks these Gen-Y males are whiny or lazy or entitled needs to visit Palo Alto or Flatiron District in New York and see them go about their work. Let’s not confuse the Meghan McCains of America with the Mark Zuckerbergs.
[SEE POST UPDATE.]
I have not yet seen the age factory come into play in my field of software engineering, and I’m 63 next month. My current project team members are both early 50’s. We did go through a period in which management entertained the fantasy of replacing us with $15/hour Indian programmers but I have not yet seen the age issue come into play.
Yeah its falsifiable, but it’s probably not going to be refuted. I welcome you to visit these kids in New York or San Francisco. There is a culture of hard work, of not tolerating incompetence, of hiring only the best, of being focused on the end goal. Its a whole culture not a few cherry-picked examples. Really!
By the way, I’ll be at your Junto talk in NYC. Be forewarned! It’s not a traditional meeting with a speaker. It’s raucous and disruptive, full of annoying monologues by self-important ideologues, but all in good fun.
[Sounds a nightmare. On the bright side: if every one speaks a lot, I won’t have to.]
I have spent some of my career fighting “high tech”. In the 1990’s, there were several detailed humongous sets of complex “physics based” computer programs to calculate several different phenomena (missile combustion, infrared emissions, atmospheric absorption & scattering, missile trajectories, sensor models …. ) all requiring lots of expertise to run the models (which agree with experimental data to about a factor of two). I came up with some hand calculator formulas and a few lookup tables to do a week of computer stuff in around 10 minutes – nice, low-tech, easier to understand, and agreed with real data to about the same accuracy. Probably got a lot of “high tech” specialists upset.
Today I listened to a description of someone with a 9300 pound “sensor pallet” to do some military detection. I then gave my talk in the afternoon that the challenge was not “how to come up with a $10 million 9300 pound solution no one can afford but how to do the job for under $ 100,000” – especially since the simpler stuff weighed 30 pounds. Sadly, we have a bunch of “high tech” people who think that “brute force” of technology is a substitute for cleverness.
I’ll concede that the hardware space may be as you describe. Software, however, is a far cry from your description.
Regarding Junto, few weeks back, the great Robert Higgs showed up to talk about his new book and did not speak a word till around 8:45PM (the event starts at 730) and i counted at least 10 monologues disrupting his talk.
Just be aware that it’s not a traditional speaker-and-q-and-a event.