Of course he wasn't talking about reaction time, but it shows an interesting trend. If reaction time slows down, then what else slows down with it? The only reason we accept the reaction time slowdown is because it's easy to measure. What about other attributes which are harder to measure, like general intelligence?
It just seems strange that everyone is saying his assertion is unquestionably false when, if anything, the evidence seems to suggest the opposite.
And don't forget experience, skill, wisdom. You could call those all "knowledge" if you want, but they have more specific connotations than just "knowin' stuff".
I don't disagree that being young confers special advantages and powers. Young people can more easily blunder up a wonderful mistake because they have less to lose. That's important. But that's not the only way!
FWIW, that particular study was pure absurdity: The only demonstrated facet of the analysis was that when you compared players of equal standings, younger players relied more upon speed. As reasonable of a conclusion was that "older" players simply made smarter moves rather than faster moves. Absolutely nothing was demonstrated about reaction time.
The youth think they know everything, but the old know they don't know everything.
Honestly though, 30 isn't that old. Perhaps it was growing up with older parents (they had me when they were over 40) but I've never viewed even 40 as "old". Getting there, sure. But not old. Old is like 70 -- retirement home.
I think I was quicker and smarter when I was younger. Now I have experience and a broad skill set with which my younger self would not be able to compete. And in ten years from now I plan to be saying that again about my current self. The stuff I produce now is rock solid and well architected. I don't need to work 12-15 hour days because I know how to get things done right, I know the appropriate solutions for a wide variety of problems. I know what works and what doesn't.
In my case, I thought I was smarter when I was younger. In hindsight it turns out I was just better at academic problem solving due to proximity of practice and my solutions/plans were rather shallow.
1. Seeing the big picture. It used to be about the technology; now, it's about people. Technology is the means to an end, not an end in itself (usually; sometimes playing is just fun).
2. Predicting pain points. School of hard knocks and all that. I've also seen a lot of technological change from my first BASIC programs on a TRS-80 and Atari 600, which informs that.
3. Knowing when to be passionate. Some things really matter; others, not so much. Those things that matter need the time and energy they deserve; the things that don't matter, well, don't. I'm much better at letting unimportant things go under the bridge, freeing time, energy and mental capacity for more important things.
This does mean it doesn't come without a cost. Here are the tradeoffs (for me, not speaking generally):
1. Much less time available. Life competes, kids have plays and soccer games, yard work has to happen, etc.
2. The desire to beat my head against a problem for 96 hours straight has waned significantly. I'm much more likely to go off and do something else and come back to it later.
3. Learning is different. It's not slower, but the process is different. For things that have a positive pattern match from the past, learning is very fast; but if there is no pattern match, it takes more repetitions to make it stick long term.
Over all, I think I'm a much better software developer today than I was 15 years ago. My code is better, stronger, faster, and I'm not running in circles as often.
I came to realize that Zuckerberg didn't program computers: he programmed people. His skill was in understanding how people thought and how to manipulate them.
So it doesn't surprise me that he said that to a room full of young wantrepreneurs ready to kill themselves working 100-hour weeks in hopes of an acquihire (probably by Facebook). It also doesn't surprise me that he blew $100 million on the good cause of helping his home school district -- looked great in the press and continued the narrative he wanted for himself. It manipulates large numbers of people in a way he wants them manipulated. This is his medium.
I wish him the best -- and that maybe he learns a little bit. I know that probably sounds condescending, but Zuck is at a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of us, similar to that disadvantage faced by rockstars: he's at the top of his game. The job has to be a killer, but as far as social feedback goes, he's unlikely to screw it up. When I was 25, if I went in and told my boss he was an idiot, I would lose my job. People would ask me what my problem was, and I'd have a good chance to do some introspection. He has no similar natural social limitations. So he can keep on saying and doing things like this without the opportunity for introspection most of us would have.
That sucks.
EDIT: Removed the first clause, which seemed to be giving some people problems.
Good grief. It was a shortcut. I absolutely don't make such broad generalizations based just on films. If you would like me to support my premise, just ask. Happy to provide it.
So what are some technological feats that people under 30 have achieved? The only one I can think of is Linux, I think that Linus was like 22 when he started it. That being said, I don't know how l33t were first versions of Linux.
> Facebook is the most used software in the world.
This is very obviously not true. For example, more people use PHP than use Facebook (supposing that there is at least one user of PHP who does not use Facebook, such as e.g. myself). I'll let you construct additional examples for yourself.
And if, btw, you argue that the users of Facebook don't "use" PHP, then I'll argue that they don't "use" Facebook in exactly the same way, since their web browser (or mobile client) is an intermediary.
My understanding/recollection of the early history of Linux is that it owed a significant debt to Minix [1] which was developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum [2] at age (wait for it) 43...
It owed a significant debt to MINIX mostly in that Linus did his work under MINIX while he was getting the kernel to something usable. Code wasn't copied and architecture was quite different (Tanenbaum had mostly bad things to say about the design of Linux).
The original EMACS was written by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, Jr. when they were 23 and 22 respectively. Fortran was proposed by John Backus when he was 29. The first lisp implementation was created by Steve Russell before he was 30.
Those are just three of four things that I checked (John McCarthy was in his early 30s). The idea that once you're over 30 you can no longer hack it is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the opposite has any truth to it.
Edit: Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs when she was 27-28.
When it came out? Not particularly. Linux wasn't exactly groundbreaking when it went public either though. Typically "big deals" take a few years to get rolling. Much of what was invented by people in their 20s throughout history did not make it to the public until years, or even decades, later.
Throwing out some more: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Johannes Kepler.
* John Karmack's game engines for Commander Keen, Doom, Quake
* Palmer Luckey's original Rift design
* Feynman's "parallel" computer at Los Alamos
And many many more if you include mathematical / physical discoveries although these
are not strictly speaking "technological feats". I would add that I do not agree with Zuck's statement, no matter how many examples I can come up with (and despite the fact that I'm myself under 30)
Feynman worked on parallelism with a team of other scientists ranging in ages, he just happened to be put as head of the 'IBM Group' which had been tasked with yield calculations at that time. It's unfair to say he alone invented parallelism, which is sadly becoming the popular opinion.
I don't know enough about the other feats to comment on them.
It's way impressive how young Feynman was when he was apart of the whole project, though. He was the youngest member.
Let me quote an excerpt from Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (p. 127 from my edition): "... I had a very good group [..] clever boys from high school who had an engineering ability". So yes, it was a team of people, but those working on this specific problem seem to have been high schoolers or recently graduated kids :)
Yes, and I recommend the article: it confirms that life expectancy was 38 and only 8% of people reaching adulthood lived to be 60.
The article is trying to say that life expectancy is reduced by high child mortality, but that's a pretty harsh adult life expectancy too. Surely almost everybody alive was under 30.
Actually, that's still true: a majority of people in the world are under 30.
Newton himself lived to be 84. He published Principia Mathematica aged 45. As the article explains, life expectancy is just an average.
But it is relevant here: if most people alive are under 30, most stuff gets done by under 30s.
That's irrelevant for two reasons. First, the life expactancy for someone who is x years old was higher than 38, which is the life expectancy at birth. Second, there's no obvious rule of nature that people will accomplish amazing feats at an earlier age if their life expectancy is lower.
Third: That was the life expectancy at birth across society in general at the time, not the life expectancy of somebody fortunate enough to be able to go into academia.
Most of the people mentioned in this thread from that era in fact lived into their 70s or 80s (70 for Leibniz, 84 for Newton, etc). That might be a coincidence, but I suspect that reduced occupational hazards played a significant role.
I think there can be a certain inquisitiveness that those under 30 have which dwindles as one ages. I wouldn't say 30 is the point where that all breaks, but certainly he has a point. That inquisitiveness, I think, leads youngsters to try new things and come at problems from a new angle.
Every one of these threads about age seems to turn into a circlejerk about how awesome being old is. It makes me wonder, is it just the old people feel the need to defend themselves in these threads, or is HN actually getting older? Maybe its picked up a lot of ex-slashdot users?
“Why are most chess masters under 30? I don’t know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.” ---Mark Zuckerberg
Because chess is more important than family.
I love this place, but will not deny that the Bay Area tech community's hubris is at astronomical levels.
...I'm just glad we're done talking about splitting California into smaller states.
Good point. The counter-quote could easily be something like
"Why do most Nobel Prize winners do their prize winning work in their mid/late 30s? I don't know. Older people have more experience. They prioritize. They have families. Having more responsibilities forces you to be more efficient."
But I won't knock Zuckerberg for being young and naive once. I was too. Hopefully he's growing up a bit and realizing that there is a lot more to success than founder age.
I do not see it much in the southeast US. .Net and Java dominate the programming language culture here, and you do not just jump in and learn all of .Net or Java in a year or two. For all of its many shortcomings, the south does seem to have a reverence for age and experience (which might contribute heavily to aforementioned shortcomings).
Even at startups, I would guess that the average programmer is over 30 in my area (Charleston, SC). An older programmer here can pretty much live like a king/queen on their salary with nearly limitless employment, assuming they keep somewhat up to date ("up to date" being more like "knows how to use OOP and a standard ORM", not "has a prolific Github profile and uses TDD"). In fact, many of the top programmers you see here are people who left SF or NYC for more stable employment in finance, cushy consulting, and better real estate prospects.
[Disclaimer: I am neither an older programmer nor a .Net/Java dev, but this has been my anecdotal experience]
I'd be interested to know the number or ratio of startup created by under 30 and have failed vs number of startups created by over 30 and failed. My guess is there'd be less failure by over 30 founders.
Data/results from it would be near useless unless you were able to question only people with zero-responsibility (ie no family, commitments) and equal risk.
Not necessarily - depends on your goal in such a study. If you were looking to see the impact of age and age alone, sure that'd be tough to control for with all the added factors. However, startups don't occur in a vacuum and I think it'd be interesting to see some comparisons without worrying about age as the only factor.
Most research points to mid/late 30's as the peak of technological breakthroughs (largely determined by age of Nobel winning work). I'd actually be somewhat surprised if successful company founders weren't largely distributed around that same range.
Only if you're interested in age as a strictly biological factor. Most of these discussions focus on age as a proxy for experience, in which case a larger n is entirely the point.
I'm understanding and doing stuff now in my mid-thirties that my young self only wished he could do. To boot, I'm more excited and passionate about my craft than ever; certainly more excited than I was in my mid-twenties. I don't see this trend changing anytime soon.
Then again, I'm probably an old engineer at heart :) I love talking to those guys in their 50s that were programming COBOL or assembler before I was born. I was sitting in a career course thing recently and some of the older guys were sharing their experiences applying for jobs; all I could think was that I'd love to hire these guys if I had the means. Give me a wise engineer any day.
The old guys vastly underestimate the productivity difference between old tech and hip new tech.
The young guys vastly overestimate how much of their productivity is due to their own smarts rather than using hip tech, and don't sufficiently appreciate that when they get older, the experience they've accumulated won't be worth much, either. Re-learning everything every 5 years is only fun the first and second times.
But certainly, years of experience with some tech is becoming less and less valuable, as the tech is changing faster and faster.
Most of the time what changes is cosmetics, not paradigms. And also being productive is just not about code, it's about time management, human interaction, strategic thinking... All stuff that gets better with experience.
Your comment represents a particularly distasteful type of arrogance. Despite being too young to have actually studied serious topics to any great depth, you feel that you know more than everyone else. This toxic attitude is holding back our industry more than anything else.
geezer here - You don't really have to relearn everything every 5 years, but yeah, part of what I love about tech is that I'm always learning and ready to adopt cool new technology when it is truly a better solution to a problem. Experience allows me to see through the hype and know when something new is actually better, something that younger guys lack. I feel really young at heart because I'm always learning. One thing 20-30 year olds should remember, time speeds up as you get older. You will be forty before you know it. Better start creating an industry that can support you when you are older or else you will be the next dinosaur who can't get a job.
Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. - Richard Hamming
I'm 54 and learning node.js recently was a snap. Why? Because I know 10 other languages and have written production code for 30 years.
I have interviewed a lot of young programmers and they talk about all this new cool stuff yet their skills to write core SQL and true production-level code is lacking. If you want to generalise, I can too.
I look back at things I said and thought a couple years ago and am amazed at how little I knew then. Then whenever I think I really understand something I remember that this has been a pattern for more than a decade.
Now I just admit that I am probably clueless and just try to make the best decision with what I know now. It's helped me to be a lot less cocky.
I've actually improved with age. Oh sure, I don't crank out reams of code as fast as I once did. But I manage now to produce rather more functionality with less code.
My last office-mate sometimes joked that old dogs can't learn new tricks.
And perhaps that's true.
But then again, it's only the puppies who think those tricks are new.
Particularly on the topic of having children, buying cars or homes, being loyal to a company or the concept of risk taking, the current 30 - 40 year old would have a complete different mindset than the 30 - 40 year old from 10 - 20 years ago.
I don't think younger people are smarter. Some people younger than I am are smarter than I will ever be, simple as that, especially when it comes to niche topics. But that's true for people older than me, too.
That being said, I feel like silicon valley gives preference to younger people in large part due to ingrained social expectations. A young 20-24 year old that pitches gets a lot of lee-way.
They have a passion and fire in them, so anything they say seems more impressive especially because you might not expect it of them. It's like a 5 year old regurgitating some obscure or advanced factoid...wow you say, what a smart young man! Objectively the kid isn't smart, but relatively speaking he appears very smart, especially compared to other 5 year olds.
The standards increase as you get older. You can't just walk in and pitch like you're an idealistic 20-something. You have to project complete confidence...essentially you need to act like the boss society expects you to already be. In contrast, younger entrepreneurs benefit from a sort of stereotype: younger people are "fresher" ideas, aren't held back by convention, etc. Older people are expected to know how to run shit and aren't allowed to just skate by on vision alone.
147 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadthanks.
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3...
Taken literally, it seems to be true. Your reaction time slows down after 24, as the data shows.
Though I guess we always need the "technically corrrct" comment ;)
It just seems strange that everyone is saying his assertion is unquestionably false when, if anything, the evidence seems to suggest the opposite.
knowledge however, increases.
I don't disagree that being young confers special advantages and powers. Young people can more easily blunder up a wonderful mistake because they have less to lose. That's important. But that's not the only way!
Honestly though, 30 isn't that old. Perhaps it was growing up with older parents (they had me when they were over 40) but I've never viewed even 40 as "old". Getting there, sure. But not old. Old is like 70 -- retirement home.
My parents were in their 40s while I was starting elementary school, and can't help but see that as 'old'.
Zuckerberg will learn this as he gets older.
Seriously, what I've found I'm better at:
1. Seeing the big picture. It used to be about the technology; now, it's about people. Technology is the means to an end, not an end in itself (usually; sometimes playing is just fun).
2. Predicting pain points. School of hard knocks and all that. I've also seen a lot of technological change from my first BASIC programs on a TRS-80 and Atari 600, which informs that.
3. Knowing when to be passionate. Some things really matter; others, not so much. Those things that matter need the time and energy they deserve; the things that don't matter, well, don't. I'm much better at letting unimportant things go under the bridge, freeing time, energy and mental capacity for more important things.
This does mean it doesn't come without a cost. Here are the tradeoffs (for me, not speaking generally):
1. Much less time available. Life competes, kids have plays and soccer games, yard work has to happen, etc.
2. The desire to beat my head against a problem for 96 hours straight has waned significantly. I'm much more likely to go off and do something else and come back to it later.
3. Learning is different. It's not slower, but the process is different. For things that have a positive pattern match from the past, learning is very fast; but if there is no pattern match, it takes more repetitions to make it stick long term.
Over all, I think I'm a much better software developer today than I was 15 years ago. My code is better, stronger, faster, and I'm not running in circles as often.
So it doesn't surprise me that he said that to a room full of young wantrepreneurs ready to kill themselves working 100-hour weeks in hopes of an acquihire (probably by Facebook). It also doesn't surprise me that he blew $100 million on the good cause of helping his home school district -- looked great in the press and continued the narrative he wanted for himself. It manipulates large numbers of people in a way he wants them manipulated. This is his medium.
I wish him the best -- and that maybe he learns a little bit. I know that probably sounds condescending, but Zuck is at a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of us, similar to that disadvantage faced by rockstars: he's at the top of his game. The job has to be a killer, but as far as social feedback goes, he's unlikely to screw it up. When I was 25, if I went in and told my boss he was an idiot, I would lose my job. People would ask me what my problem was, and I'd have a good chance to do some introspection. He has no similar natural social limitations. So he can keep on saying and doing things like this without the opportunity for introspection most of us would have.
That sucks.
EDIT: Removed the first clause, which seemed to be giving some people problems.
Which is perfectly understandable, because that's how humans normally converse, particularly on topics that are not known to be very controversial.
This is very obviously not true. For example, more people use PHP than use Facebook (supposing that there is at least one user of PHP who does not use Facebook, such as e.g. myself). I'll let you construct additional examples for yourself.
And if, btw, you argue that the users of Facebook don't "use" PHP, then I'll argue that they don't "use" Facebook in exactly the same way, since their web browser (or mobile client) is an intermediary.
Facebook doesn't really fit into that category. It was MySpace 2.0
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2014/30-under-30/techno... Another 30
Seymour Cray was just over 30 when the Cray-1 came out.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
Those are just three of four things that I checked (John McCarthy was in his early 30s). The idea that once you're over 30 you can no longer hack it is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the opposite has any truth to it.
Edit: Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs when she was 27-28.
Throwing out some more: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Johannes Kepler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Peter_Deutsch http://www.codersatwork.com/l-peter-deutsch.html
* John Karmack's game engines for Commander Keen, Doom, Quake * Palmer Luckey's original Rift design * Feynman's "parallel" computer at Los Alamos
And many many more if you include mathematical / physical discoveries although these are not strictly speaking "technological feats". I would add that I do not agree with Zuck's statement, no matter how many examples I can come up with (and despite the fact that I'm myself under 30)
I don't know enough about the other feats to comment on them.
It's way impressive how young Feynman was when he was apart of the whole project, though. He was the youngest member.
http://ffxlearn.zf4.biz/index.php?title=Life_expectancy_in_t...
The article is trying to say that life expectancy is reduced by high child mortality, but that's a pretty harsh adult life expectancy too. Surely almost everybody alive was under 30.
Actually, that's still true: a majority of people in the world are under 30.
Newton himself lived to be 84. He published Principia Mathematica aged 45. As the article explains, life expectancy is just an average.
But it is relevant here: if most people alive are under 30, most stuff gets done by under 30s.
Most of the people mentioned in this thread from that era in fact lived into their 70s or 80s (70 for Leibniz, 84 for Newton, etc). That might be a coincidence, but I suspect that reduced occupational hazards played a significant role.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin with Google
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc
Pierre Omidyar, eBay (some may say it's not an impressive technical feat, I disagree)
Bill Joy did plenty of amazing work before 30 (including co-founding Sun)
Sandy Lerner founded Cisco and did some amazing technical work pre 30
Bob Metcalfe was around 27 when he created ethernet
Because chess is more important than family.
I love this place, but will not deny that the Bay Area tech community's hubris is at astronomical levels.
...I'm just glad we're done talking about splitting California into smaller states.
But I won't knock Zuckerberg for being young and naive once. I was too. Hopefully he's growing up a bit and realizing that there is a lot more to success than founder age.
Even at startups, I would guess that the average programmer is over 30 in my area (Charleston, SC). An older programmer here can pretty much live like a king/queen on their salary with nearly limitless employment, assuming they keep somewhat up to date ("up to date" being more like "knows how to use OOP and a standard ORM", not "has a prolific Github profile and uses TDD"). In fact, many of the top programmers you see here are people who left SF or NYC for more stable employment in finance, cushy consulting, and better real estate prospects.
[Disclaimer: I am neither an older programmer nor a .Net/Java dev, but this has been my anecdotal experience]
Most research points to mid/late 30's as the peak of technological breakthroughs (largely determined by age of Nobel winning work). I'd actually be somewhat surprised if successful company founders weren't largely distributed around that same range.
Then again, I'm probably an old engineer at heart :) I love talking to those guys in their 50s that were programming COBOL or assembler before I was born. I was sitting in a career course thing recently and some of the older guys were sharing their experiences applying for jobs; all I could think was that I'd love to hire these guys if I had the means. Give me a wise engineer any day.
Also, can we please raise the cut off if it's really young? Please?
The old guys vastly underestimate the productivity difference between old tech and hip new tech.
The young guys vastly overestimate how much of their productivity is due to their own smarts rather than using hip tech, and don't sufficiently appreciate that when they get older, the experience they've accumulated won't be worth much, either. Re-learning everything every 5 years is only fun the first and second times.
But certainly, years of experience with some tech is becoming less and less valuable, as the tech is changing faster and faster.
I'm 54 and learning node.js recently was a snap. Why? Because I know 10 other languages and have written production code for 30 years.
I have interviewed a lot of young programmers and they talk about all this new cool stuff yet their skills to write core SQL and true production-level code is lacking. If you want to generalise, I can too.
Now I just admit that I am probably clueless and just try to make the best decision with what I know now. It's helped me to be a lot less cocky.
My last office-mate sometimes joked that old dogs can't learn new tricks.
And perhaps that's true.
But then again, it's only the puppies who think those tricks are new.
That being said, I feel like silicon valley gives preference to younger people in large part due to ingrained social expectations. A young 20-24 year old that pitches gets a lot of lee-way.
They have a passion and fire in them, so anything they say seems more impressive especially because you might not expect it of them. It's like a 5 year old regurgitating some obscure or advanced factoid...wow you say, what a smart young man! Objectively the kid isn't smart, but relatively speaking he appears very smart, especially compared to other 5 year olds.
The standards increase as you get older. You can't just walk in and pitch like you're an idealistic 20-something. You have to project complete confidence...essentially you need to act like the boss society expects you to already be. In contrast, younger entrepreneurs benefit from a sort of stereotype: younger people are "fresher" ideas, aren't held back by convention, etc. Older people are expected to know how to run shit and aren't allowed to just skate by on vision alone.