
The Most Important Assets you Lose when you're over 30 - transburgh
http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/2007/6/20/the-most-important-assets-you-lose-when-youre-over-30/10169/view.aspx
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geebee
They guy has a point here. I think facebook wasn't the greatest example, but
in general, people are in danger of ossifying as they age.

I'm in my mid-30s now, and I know some people who are, or at least were,
really good programmers. But I was amazed recently when they didn't really
know what Ruby on Rails was, or django, or AJAX. I'm not trying to play
buzzword bingo here, and I certainly don't think people need to know these
things in detail, or agree that they're good tools. But it is very alarming
that they draw a blank. These aren't obscure technologies - if you haven't
even _heard_ of them, you clearly aren't paying attention.

I suppose the 30+ set could get insular enough that nobody brings these things
up.. whereas it's nearly impossible _not_ to learn about them if you hang with
a younger crowd.

That said, I had a professor in college who was over 70. He could write
programs on the whiteboard that would compile without a single syntax error -
it was bizarre. He was unbelievably up-to-date. And it wasn't out of some kind
of old man and the sea stubbornness, it was just deep in his personality to
keep reading, hacking, knowing what's up.

You can't tell who has a drinking problem in college, because everyone drinks
too much - you have to wait and see who's still overdoing it 10 years later.
By the same token, maybe you can't tell who the true hackers are until they've
considered and rejected the opportunity to fade away...

~~~
wschroter
You're totally on point with what I'm saying. It's about the fact that when
you get older the crowd you run in is worrying about mortgage payments,
spouses and kids. You don't have the time or curiosity to engage new stuff and
share it with your friends like you used to.

And yes, there is probably SOME GUY out there that does. It's a trend, not an
absolute rule.

~~~
Tichy
Friends of my age are all having children right now. That way I learned about
the existence of pages like <http://lilypie.com/> which seems to cater for
parents. What if something like that is the next killer-app? Older people
would be more likely to create an application like that, I would think. Why
should the "teen apps" be the only ones that are interesting?

~~~
wschroter
It's not that the "teen" apps are the ones that matter. Don't take Facebook /
Myspace so literally. It's pointing to the fact that major opportunities are
being created that are obvious to one generation and almost oblivous from
another.

~~~
geebee
Another factor can be that the previous generation doesn't see what's such a
big deal about a groundbreaking technology. A lot of the folks 10 years older
than me had trouble seeing what was so revolutionary about HTML and a browser
(you're requesting a file and displaying it through a markup language? OK...
and how is this different?) Personally, it took me a long time to grasp why
blogging offered so much more than just maintaining a personal website (that
said, RSS did seem very cool from the get-go). Facebook was hard to
distinguish from earlier (may I call them 1.0?) applications that were
"basically a bunch of web pages linked together" (a bunch of these went down
with the first dot-com bubble).

So another risk is too much awareness - rather than being technically
clueless, the older crowd goes too far in the other direction.

A handful of genes separates a human fom a sea cumcumber (ok, maybe a _little_
more than a handful)... uhh, how is this different from using DNA to make more
DNA? ;)

~~~
wschroter
@ Tichy - I really like your point about a younger generation missing out on
an older trend. Perhaps we're just used to seeing more opportunities creep up
from the younger generation than vice versa.

Point well made.

------
menloparkbum
According to Comscore, 40% of MySpace users are over 35 and 33% of Facebook
users are over 35. The numbers for people aged 18-24 on facebook is only 1%
higher than the 35+ demographic.

A large number of 18-24 year olds makes sense because Facebook started out as
a way for students to network, and the site's features remain optimized for
people still in school.

Regarding curiosity and learning by trial and error - most people are not
naturally curious. In 1994, many 42 year old people didn't understand why you
would need a web page. However, neither did most 22 year olds.

~~~
steve
This is absolutely not how myspace started.

------
wschroter
It's funny how often these articles go scanned versus read.

A few points of clarification

1\. Thanks to migpwr for pointing out that facebook was just an example of the
generational gap, not the point of why facebook is good or bad.

2\. The generational age issue has never been more salient than it is now
since the periods between meaningful technological changes are shortening
significantly.

3\. I'm over 30 and writing/building companies based on these technologies but
I'm doing so as more of an outsider than an insider like before.

~~~
youngnh
Additionally, the generational gap might simply mean that 30 year olds won't
write the next 100%-high-school-adoption-rate app in the same way a 22 year-
old probably won't write the next parenting/401k management/funeral home-
related application. If you turn 30 don't give up on writing good software.

What might be a more important metric is the willingness of a certain
demographic to adopt a well-written piece of software in large numbers. Will
these high-schoolers grow up and be 30 year-olds flocking to new applications
in droves or is there something about being young that makes you do exactly
what your friends are doing?

~~~
wschroter
I think as a gen-x'er we grew up in a time period (the dot com era) where much
of our careers was defined by a major generational/technological change that
provided us a great deal of opportunity. For that, we are aware of how these
shifts can create great opportunities, but now we're becoming aware of where
they can be liabilities as well. (now that we're the old guys)

------
davidw
Ok, all these age articles have convinced me. I'm going to be 25 instead of
31, as that may well be the ideal age to start a startup.

------
catfish
What a bunch of horsepoop.

Being nearly 50, having ridden the first communication wave called BULLETIN
BOARD SYSTEMS, the second wave called HTTP (the internet existed long before
the graphic web), and the third wave called CELL PHONES, I learned that
"INHERENTLY GETTING IT" doesn't matter for squat.

The only true form of "GETTING IT" that matters can be summed up in three
words and it applies across all generations, fads, and follies.

Follow the money.

That's it. Thats all there is too it. Give me a bleeding edge wave of any
sort, comprised of a significant member class, young or old, and the only
metric that matters is who makes the money.

The rest of this crap about how some group "GETS IT" inherently, is mental
masturbation. The only person who truly "GETS IT" is the old fart VC who
cashes the biggest checks while getting the young and the dumb to paint the
fence. Praise be unto him, Samuel Clemens was right.

As I grew older, and discarded the arrogance of youth, I changed my focus. The
metric that matters most in terms of inherently "GETTING IT", is determined
strictly by your position in the cash flow. I don't need a myspace reddit
delicious facebook account to get that!

I need a dumb kid willing to take up front money for an idea so that they can
feverishly burn through a few years of their life, and in the end get their
well deserved and fully diluted 2% return.

Give me that please, with sugar on top. The youthful are there to be
exploited. Period. They beg for it with their arrogance. I for one am more
than happy to oblige them. Why would I care about what they inherently GET?

I don't.

In fact I hope that every one of them I meet has this particular chip on their
shoulder because it makes it all the more easy to steal the fruit of their
labor, which is what I "INHERENTLY GET".

~~~
wschroter
That was the most obnoxious view of our youth I've read in a long time. Well
done.

------
Tichy
So basically what he says is that over 30 you lose the ability to be excited
about Windows Vista? Fine, I can live with that.

The reason I don't have a facebook account is that I used to have an Orkut
account and eventually got bored with the whole thing. Perhaps the class of
2007 was too young when Orkut came out, so they try Facebook instead -
eventually they might get bored, too, only time will tell.

Maybe Facebook is so much better than Orkut, but in the meantime there are so
many other things to do.

Btw., I am over 30 and I am still reading articles like that, which basically
refutes the article's thesis.

~~~
nostrademons
The class of 2007 absolutely will get bored with Facebook - I know many
members of it that got bored with MySpace before it, and LiveJournal before
that, and Xanga before _that_.

But in the process, they will have explored every feature of it, added dozens
of third-party apps, started using it in ways the developers never intended,
and possibly created a few competitors.

The point of the article, as I understood it, was to not let "But it'll be
obsolete in five years!" be a reason to keep you from learning something new.
Of course it'll be obsolete in five years. Chances are, your job will be too,
and we'll all be using some website or technology or whatever that hasn't been
invented yet.

FWIW, I have a FaceBook account, a MySpace, 2 Livejournals, 3 PlanWorlds
(that's an Amherst-only social network), 2 Bloggers, a DeadJournal, a
GreatestJournal, a uJournal, and a Plog. I don't use all of them regularly,
but I do keep up with a good half-dozen or so of them.

~~~
Tichy
I had a blog before the name was invented (diary on diaryland). Right now I am
doing some Scripting for Second Life.

I really don't feel as if I have lost the taste for learning new things.

------
wschroter
Facebook isn't the all-telling oracle. It's the fact that my ENTIRE CLASS is
not on it from 1992 and the entire class is on it in 2007 that demonstrates
the significant generational gap.

------
tx
Well... there were lots of things we _all_ used to do when me and my friends
were in high school. Most of those things were... well... _absurdly dumb_ just
like most things you do when you're in high school.

Nobody used to write articles "ahh! I don't get it, I'm old!" about it back
then.

------
lkozma
Sorry, but I don't see the connection between not being on Facebook and "not
getting it" as the author implies.

~~~
migpwr
Which is exactly why he wrote this article...

------
donna
Again with the age stories... living life fully in exploring what one loves
and finds interesting, and exciting. For me personally; MySpace/Facebook do
not offer anything of interest. LinkedIn offers more of what i'm interested in
spending my time on.

------
wschroter
In all fairness I should have titled the article more toward what _I'M_ losing
over 30!

------
abstractbill
"What I'm going to lose is the benefit of learning. My experience is going to
let me avoid mistakes but at the same time avoid learning from those
mistakes."

This is one of the few points anyone's made in the whole age debate that I
agree with.

~~~
create_account
Huh?

That makes little sense.

If you're experienced enough to avoid a mistake, you _have_ learned that
lesson, and that's why you don't repeat it.

~~~
abstractbill
The point I took away from the article is this: There are things I have enough
experience of that I will never do them (installing Vista was the example from
the article). But there _may_ be things that I would learn along the way if I
did install Vista that would be useful to me in some random venture.

~~~
gyro_robo
Of course you could do something else more productive with that same amount of
time, which would be even more useful.

------
migpwr
You all are focusing on "Facebook" and missing the point.

