Millions of Americans have been crushed by the pandemic but older workers have faced both an economy with high levels of unemployment and a virus that puts them more at risk than younger people. And once they do lose a job it can be harder to find new ones, with many older workers simply giving up the search. Paul Solman reports as part of our series, "Unfinished Business."
Much has been said about the pandemic ruining the economic prospects for young people but it may actually destroy older Americans lives. This segment interviews people who are supporting younger family members, who can’t live on social security alone, and people who may never be rehired even when the pandemic ends.
“Compared to the underrepresentation of women and minorities in tech, the scarcity of programmers in their forties and beyond has mostly escaped notice. ... The software industry is overwhelmingly young. The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42. A 2018 Stack Overflow survey of 100,000 programmers around the world found that three-quarters of them were under 35. ... Anxious developers in their late thirties chime in and identify themselves as among the ‘older.’”
“Lifelong programmers must keep their skills up to date, but they are in a race against time in a constantly transforming industry. According to a 2018 research paper, skills change faster in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs than in other industries, and the headlong rate of change for programmers is especially severe. Kadeem L. Noray, one of the paper’s authors, says that ‘STEM is more skills-oriented that other fields,’ valuing short-lived competencies over durable wisdom. For each skill a STEM professional learns, another becomes obsolete, leaving little chance for accumulating skills and increasing salary.”
“Making the software industry more welcoming to coders past their thirties and creating roles suited for very experienced programmers will make companies more effective and more fair. These changes will also benefit the rest of us — in a society increasingly governed by software and algorithms, programmers must gain some wisdom to match their power. They must learn from recent incidents of hacking, biased algorithms, and online incitement of genocide. The only way to do that is for older coders to stay in the industry long enough to pass their knowledge to their successors. Cultivating lifelong coders will ensure that the lessons learned today are still remembered 50 years from now.”
Medium, March 8, 2019: “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders,” by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
MIT Sloane Management Review, March 29, 2019: “The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker,” William R. Kerr
How did we let the wisdom of the aged get away from us?
❤ “Experience: the only thing we still make one day at a time. It is a jewel of immeasurable value. Stop squandering it. Venerate it.” Celebrate Wisdom!
Being old meant your words had value. You had psychological clout. You knew secrets. You were often wiser than you liked to appear. Nobody likes a know-it-all, even if you are always right…
Let’s face it, appearing dotty is one of the benefits of being old, too.
There still a few cultures where the old still have some social clout. Yes, it cuts both ways, but I have rarely met a granny whom I didn’t respect. There is something about the way the light hits their eye.
A knowing. A clarity. Like she can see right through you. Your every movement a telegraph of information. Your every breath reveals symphonies about your state of mind.
This is why granny was so formidable. She could read you like a book.
This is why ageism is so hard on our culture today.
Yes, you read that right. Ageism is hard on our culture.
When we (the culture) discriminate against older workers, older people, senior citizens, people of advanced years, whatever euphemism you use to avoid talking about those people you don’t talk about, you harm yourselves.
You deny people who have lived, who have understood a hardship beyond anything you can imagine and have survived it, some better than others, many wiser for it. Hardships come at least once a generation.
This means one generation lives it, the next hears about the last waiting for the next. Science has made it possible for hardship to skip a generation, through advances in civilization.
This skipped generation is the one which is most dangerous.
They breed a generation which has not seen hardship and not heard about it either. They become extravagant and wasteful in their old age. They don’t remember pulling together during the tough times. They are not connected to their neighbors. They know nothing of solidarity.
This means they will exploit each other and everyone around them, until one day they look around and have aided one sliver of society to grow powerful; without the limits of morality, they would stop at nothing, defy convention, do whatever it took to be wealthy.
Hence the current rapine orgy-fest of destruction of our Baby Boomers-in-Charge all over the world.
They did not get the wisdom of the aged. It was too far away. Hospitalized for their own protection. Hidden away. The threat of death, forestalled by hospice, distance and convenience.
Disconnected from age, they pretend they can live forever. Learning nothing. Teaching nothing. Experiencing nothing. Nothing that matters, nothing with the stress of life on it. No lesson where the outcome of failure was loss. Without this lesson you cannot say you have ever known hardship.
Previous research suggests that remote work boosts employment for older workers with disabilities, but how will it affect those without disabilities?
The greater flexibility of remote work could lead people to work longer. Or, if employers think it reduces productivity, it could instead lead to earlier exits.
This study finds that those working remotely appear somewhat less likely to retire, even controlling for job characteristics like sector, industry, and earnings.
An open question is whether this beneficial effect is due to remote work itself or the fact that those wanting longer careers go to jobs with remote options.
