[FRIAM] are we how we behave?

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus/Glen/Nick -


> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html
>     Ha!  It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may contradict my opinion of myself."
>     
>     On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>     > An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself."
>     > 
>     > Keep fattening that tube, baby! 
>     

Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30.  Reminds me of my
own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust anyone
over 30!".  Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat"
generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put
out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture.

Well into my 40's I still felt relevant in virtually every work-context
I found myself in.   This was partly because I had managed to (moslty)
keep up with the broad strokes of the technology and culture of
science/computing/internet.     I was regularly outshined by the
occasional genius/polymath/young-turk, but not entirely eclipsed.

I remember acutely when at about 45, one of my (slightly) older
colleagues referred to me as one of the "as yet disproven" employees in
the group I was working in.  I had moved from a Big-Iron (HPC) computing
division to a more nimble and scrappy "Decision Support Sciences"
division a couple of years earlier.  My "elder" colleague was making a
good point in that new context where there was always a lot of "hype"
flying around (program managers selling it to sponsors and tech folks
selling it to program managers) and it appeared that every "new face"
was given a grace period, but after a few years if they hadn't
*consistently* kept their snake-oil fresh, they could be treated as
*stale* snake-oil salesmen.   

I never quite hit that place in that division  but saw it coming.  I
missed (or ducked) opportunities to move up into program or line
management positions, which was the best (only?) way of avoiding
becoming deprecated in place.   A few of the "old fogies" managed to
keep a tech niche open by supporting some obscure program or technology
that nobody else really wanted, and no (fresh) snake oil was needed
for.  Others just hunkered down and depended on institutional inertia to
carry them into (and beyond) early retirement.

At 52 I "took my show on the road", accepting Bechtel's (LANL) buyout
offer they put out to avoid having to do a forced layoff (they got 500
volunteers for the 800 staff they wanted to shed).   This was also just
as the SFComplex was forming so I spent a good 4 years working
"double-time" to try to help make Sfx viable while pursuing my own
professional work.    I didn't feel (entirely) out of touch/date
technically then, but I *was* aware that I couldn't keep up with both
breadth and depth.  To make it all a bit more painful, many of the
technologies I had helped "pioneer" (in a minor way)  over the preceding
3 decades had hit a point of resurgent popularity and ease-of-entry.  
Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, Discrete Simulation, Visual
Analytics, Virtual Reality, Distributed Systems development, etc.   were
all *finally* becoming mainstream and *everybody* was on the
bandwagon.   But few had to hand-jam HTML, write socket-level
communications, write raw OpenGL, do careful memory/pointer management,
worry overmuch about vertex/texel budgets, avoid *all* use of >= N^2
complexity algorithms, etc. and those were the hard-won skills I had
developed.   Still useful but rarely critical.

A few years ago, I gave up trying to maintain either "breadth" or
"depth" for the most part.  I still find "niches" I can contribute to
and I find that a very small (diminishing) number of potential clients
really understand and appreciate my unique offerings, but I feel
surrounded/overwhelmed by the plethora of much more
energetic/agile/up-to-date workers offering (at least superficially)
similar wares.   It is (not) satisfying for me to see my "younger"
colleagues (many of you here in your 40's/50's) starting to feel that
same pressure...  but inevitable?

This all leads me to wonder how much of the "automation economy" is
going to invade the high-tech job market, and how that will be
relieved.   I don't know if it will be shortened workweeks, (much)
earlier retirement, serial multiple careers, guaranteed minimum incomes,
or some combination that relieves the combination of an accelerated
change of pace and increased leverage/automation through technology.  
The holy grails of my early career such as hardware improvements to
obviate the need for extreme memory/CPU/Network conservation, and
code-reuse, have come to fruit and in many ways are the source of my own
(and others?) deprecation.  

It feels not unlike the end of the 19th century farmer whose skills with
animal husbandry may not have prepared him so much for the
industrial-age overtaking agriculture.  My grandfathers both
endured/survived the end of that era.  The elder still spoke
nostalgically and fondly of the various mules he depended on up until he
had to quit the farm in his late 60's.

My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and  VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT
and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML.   I barely know the names
of the new
tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/???
technology.

Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings,

 - Steve