
Why innovators get better with age - mitmads
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/jobs/why-innovators-get-better-with-age.html
======
rayiner
I think the idea that the "true innovators" are a bunch of kids with no
experience is massively counter-productive. If you look at the real innovators
in computing (not Zuck) over the last 50 years, you'll see that the ripest
period seems to be 30-40. Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded what became
Oracle. Bradeen was 39 and Brattain 45 when they invented the transistor. Bill
Hewlett and David Packard were 26 and 27 when they founded HP, but the company
achieved its real successes during the war when they were in their 30's.

The reason I say it's counter-productive is that it tends to upend a very
fruitful social structure: younger people learning how to innovate under the
direction older, experienced people. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie didn't
invent Unix one day between their college classes. They joined Bell Labs after
getting advanced degrees, worked on a system (Multics) implemented by older,
more experienced people, and gained the expertise they needed to innovate. You
can't really develop expertise as a young kid, and expertise is usually a pre-
requisite for real innovation.

And to tie in to the organizational management angle in the article: who would
you rather have in your organization? John Carmack circa 1991 (when he founded
id software), or John Carmack circa 2013?

If this seems counter-intuitive in the context of the current Silicon Valley
youth worship, ask yourself: what are the young kids at Twitter, Facebook,
etc, really building? The answer is: lifestyle and entertainment products.
Without demeaning the value of those products, I'll say it's not a contentious
assertion that young people have some significant insight into lifestyle and
entertainment as an industry, but that doesn't mean they're particularly
innovative.

~~~
mitmads
"expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation". May Be. But many a
times, being naive (and inexperienced) may make one to see and think
differently.

~~~
rayiner
You rarely get serious innovation out of people who are naive and simply
"think differently." As pointed out in the article, while Dirac and Einstein
were outliers and making substantial contributions to science at 26, they both
had persued extensive education leading up to that point.

Are there people who innovate out of whole cloth? Maybe. I can't think of any
offhand but I'm sure they exist. But they're not representative.
Representative are people like Larry Ellison, who build an innovative company
like Oracle (it was cutting edge in its time) by leveraging substantial
industry experience and theoretical developments.

~~~
goldfeld
Cutting edge can be mildly innovative. Facebook is somewhat innovative in my
scale; as far as I know they came up with the timeline and tagging people. But
for me really innovative are Kickstarter, Twitter, StackOverflow. Companies
that went blue ocean and literally created a new thing or changed culture in a
significant way, because of a fundamental idea, and not simply critical mass
(like Facebook.)

~~~
Retric
StackOverflow was a slightly bettor implementation of an old idea. GPS was
innovative and game changing.

~~~
RougeFemme
And GPS was based on work funded by the DoD - an organization not known to be
a worshipper of youth, at least in their R&D corners.

------
swombat
Very poorly argued points. There is no case made that innovators actually get
better with age, nor indeed a decent definition of an innovator. Apparently,
best-selling authors and directors are the best example of innovators that the
author could come up with. Skip.

~~~
rayiner
I don't know if they're poorly argued. I found the Nobel Prize statistics and
the study from the Northwestern professor fairly compelling myself. (Link from
the article: [http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-
ben/htm/Ag...](http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-
ben/htm/AgeAndGreatInvention.pdf)).

~~~
swombat
But, as pointed out by others, PhD/academia dynamics are heavily skewed by the
fact that you have to do a PhD, then work as a postgrad for ages, before you
get to run your own experiments. If you don't let anyone do anything but work
on other people's experiments until they're 35, of course you won't get many
great innovators below 30.

If anything, the fact that the average age of academic innovators is 38 rather
than 60 means that there is a large preponderance of innovations in those few
years between 30 and 38, to balance out the fact that most academics in a
position to innovate are older than 38.

However, that's still using a fairly loose definition of innovator...
arguably, people rewarded by Nobel prizes are not innovators, they're
inventors. They've come up with something wholly new, and rightly deserve much
credit for it. Innovators, however, are often those who take something new
invented by someone else and actually bring it to the wider world.

The classic example of an innovator is, of course, Steve Jobs - didn't invent
any of the stuff Apple is known for, whether mp3 players, smart phones,
tablets, or even the original Apple II (invented by Woz), but damn was he good
at getting it market-ready and then getting people to know about it.

------
mitmads
"The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or
50s" - What does this prove? Are they innovators? "But there is another reason
to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an
idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This
education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves." - I don't
fully agree with this. 'typically' is a broad word.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Well, that in particular proves that very, very few people are going to be
trusted with a project that has a $100 or $200 million dollar budget when
they're 25 and have no track record. Those are the movies that top the box
office charts.

I dunno that you can draw much of a conclusion from that.

~~~
mitmads
I agree with the fact that producers will not invest $100/$200 mn on a 25 year
old. Thats the nature of the business. No connection with innovation.

------
EliRivers
Doesn't every human activity with a large dependence on knowledge and
experience get better with age?

~~~
freyrs3
Begs the question whether doing meaningful work in a field will take more time
given that it takes a decade or two to get up to speed with current research.

------
michaelwww
The premise of the article is simple. Companies may lose money in the long run
by cutting older workers and hiring younger workers in their place to save
money. There's an obvious case to be made for experience and wisdom that comes
with age to some older workers. A blanket policy of bias towards the young is
going to lose that. Companies should be smarter about it and realize that some
older workers do get better with age. They should try to hire boy wonders and
keep some wise heads around. The author mentions a problem without naming it,
which is the Peter Principle, where workers are promoted until they reach a
level where they are no longer effective.

------
goldfeld
I like the theme but indeed this article misses out on so many opportunities
to make a good case. The innovators they are picturing are the "corporate
innovators", which is different from the young kids disrupting markets
altogether. The former are evolutionary, the latter really shine when they're
revolutionary, which often needs a new company to take over instead of a big
corp reiventing itself.

But both are great drivers of human progress. If we only developed by leaps
and bounds, revolutions, we'd be hard pressed to avance at all. I like the
concept of slow hunches. These are the ideas that you breed in your head over
years, decades. They often need to meet other slow hunches other people have
been breeding to really shine. This is a slow innovation that startup culture
completely misses out on. It's the foundation of scientific research, but it's
also very much directly (albeit slowly) applicable to business. I have a few
slow hunches of my own, which have been evolving over the last 5 years (I'm
23). They have spawned little ideas and projects already, but the main
branches keep pivoting and growing because they're far from concrete yet to be
even market tested or MVP-built.

I feel my best innovation comes about from deliberate mixing of areas of
knowledge. And it seems to me every week I have a new interest. I want to
understand painting, poetry, design, writing, statistics, politics and a lot
more. There's all this breadth I don't yet have, and I feel that's what makes
good innovators, they're generalists, and criss-cross the DNA of different
areas to create new mutations all the time. Most suck. In this sense, I'll be
so much better at 50.

It's also why I don't see myself calling software development my career in 20
years. I feel like I want to build a career that ages well, and though surely
I'll be a better developer at 40, many market dynamics will be playing against
me in the field of tech. If it's even relevant anymore in 2030. Maybe robot
code-monkeys will do, at least CRUD and interface design, much better.

I want to be a writer. I'm using article writing as a platform for all my
expression and creativity. Want to understand something better? Write as best
as I can about it, then edit, cut, edit. Like when it's said that you should
always write all software as if it were open source (commenting, modularity,
extensibility, docs), I write my thoughts as if they were published. I want to
hone the craft, and eventually, as the decades pass, have a respected career
for writing insightful articles where I wouldn't for writing old-man's code
(Though I'm pretty sure I'll actually pay my bills with software still.)

~~~
mooze
I have a whole bunch of these slow-moving projects - it's my modus operandi
really. A recurring idea surfaces during mental downtime, is improved on, then
dismissed. Repeat this until it has taken on a life of its own, then sit down
and plough through the whole implementation stage in one sitting. It's hard to
quantify or even explain properly, but it works for me. So for a certain type
of creative endeavour, yes, more time = more potential for innovation.

------
robomartin
One problem: What is innovation?

Some innovation can and does happen from a position of almost complete
ignorance. Other innovation requires years of study, domain experience and the
benefits of a multi-disciplinary background. These are vastly different
things. The former could be the domain of the younger crowd. The latter,
almost by definition, belongs to those with more candles on their cake.

Nothing wrong with either scenario.

------
trustfundbaby
amazingly content free article. disappointing read.

------
muratmutlu
I recently read another article on HN that said innovation got worse with age
and responsibilities like kids etc, does anyone remember it?

I think it depends on what industry you are in, but I have seen old guys build
bad ideas too

------
mcartyem
The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery
generally takes time.

For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early
twenties. Arguably they get worse with age.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I was curious as to whether this was true, so to test it out, I looked at
Hilbert's Problems[0], which are widely considered some of the most important
problems in Mathematics in the 20th century. Of the solvers whose ages I could
find on Wikipedia, the median age was 30.5 and the mean was 29.4. (For
Hilbert's 10th problem the solution is listed as the joint work of 4 people. I
treated them as one person with an average age of 42.5)

This obviously isn't statistically significant, but it lends some weight to
the myth that Mathematicians "die young."

~~~
mcartyem
This is great research, thank you.

------
icpmacdo
These articles remind me of the the Malcom Gladwell book(outliers?) asking the
question if this is because of all just genius or right idea right time

------
auggierose
I totally agree, I am 37 now and within the next two years will change
programming and math forever. :-)

------
wilfra
As a 32 year-old trying to break into Silicon Valley and feeling the strong
effects of subtle (and no so sutble!) age discrimination, I found the headline
and the hypothesis encouraging and really wish I could get behind it. However
the evidence in this piece is lacking and unconvincing.

He cherry picked a few examples of industries where people are required to pay
their dues before the system allows them to make a contribution. In science
one must earn a PhD as an ante into the game. Then they must earn a reputation
and tenure before they are allowed to fully devote themselves to making major
breakthroughs with their research. Early to mid 30's is roughly the age when
one would be afforded that luxury, for the few who make it that far, so it
makes perfect sense people would make their discoveries at 38.

With film it's a similar story. Directors must first go to film school, then
fetch coffee for directors, then work their way up the ranks on other peoples
projects and then catch a series of extraordinary breaks before they are given
the opportunity to direct other peoples ideas before they are finally given
the freedom to truly do what they want. If they achieve that freedom by their
50's, they are one of the chosen few.

Being an author works much the same way.

Anybody with a text editor can write code that changes the World. So it's not
the same. Does that mean young people are better at hacking than old people?
No, not automatically. Nothing can be proven from all of these examples other
than the relative barriers to entry in a given field.

~~~
aantix
You really feel a strong sense of age discrimination?

I feel it has to do with relevancy more than anything. I'm 35, a Rails
consultant, several open source gems, speaker at the upcoming Rails Conf.

I don't say this to toot my own horn, I say this because my extensive software
engineering background enhances my interactions with the latest tool sets.
I've seen a ton projects go incredibly right and wrong and want to share those
opinions and offer guidance. Those hiring me are generally younger (and my
boss) but my feeling is that they actually look up to me.

~~~
wilfra
>>my extensive software engineering background

Obviously that trumps everything. When I said I was looking to break in, I
meant I have limited experience and skills.

~~~
aantix
I understand now.

My best advice; create something open source. If front end is your strength,
create a few sample layouts and provide the html/css. If Javascript is your
thing, create a nice jquery widget that others could utilize. If Ruby is your
thing, create a gem.

Once you've done something like that, be sure to promote it. Post it to
RubyFlow, the appropriate Subreddit (reddit.com/r/ruby, /r/javascript).

Get a few "stars" for the library to show that others are interested in what
you do. Lastly, be sure to include it on your resume. Top of your resume.
Front and center.

~~~
wilfra
That's really helpful actually. Sounds like fun too, I have a few ideas
already. Thanks!

