TL;DR - Boomers ruin everything.
Hello HN!
While I earnestly desire my question be nothing more than hyperbolic ramblings of a crusty old IT guy, the antidotal conversations I've had with many of my professional contacts (most working in IT, but not all) seems to be reinforcing this drearily pessimistic observation:
Over the last several years a substantial amount of highly specialized, process critical employees have either retired early or quit abruptly across many sectors in the economy. These positions carried immense tribal knowledge that ignorant/incompetent/inexperienced management failed to adequately prepare any succession plan for, leaving entire system processes void of the knowledge and skills to necessary to perform.
These events appear to be leading society towards a sort of "critical mass of burnout" where remaining employees are being forced to saddle the responsibilities of the previous coworker but lack the experience/knowledge necessary to either perform the job efficiently, or at all. The vast majority of these people are have added duties, and the stressors that accompany them, saddled on them without the commensurate increase in compensation.
Thoughts?
None of this here, please. If anything ruins everything, it's flamebait, and generational flamebait is particularly avoidable.
New blood does not need to learn everything the grey beards knew because they are learning new skills along the way.
What is lost is unfortunately very often valuable and not obsolete, but simply not absolutely necessary to keep going forward.
I also think this is why companies and societies have to constantly expand/innovate to survive, to compensate internal decline/loss.
But there is a critical point, if we stop outpacing the knowledge loss, societies can very quickly regress, in a few generations.
A lot of human knowledge is stored in readable form, but the most sophisticated parts, with all the extremely valuable details tend to live inside human minds, in a form that is not easily translated or stored.
And yet they're still heavily dependent on that, as if they think its the best way to figure out who will push the needle
There's no thought put into long-term stability or serviceability of software. I fully understand the business need to "ship now", but if the software isn't performing its basic needs, what are you even shipping?
Why should there be? How does this improve short-term profits? Customers are happy to pay for buggy software that gets replaced with something even worse in a few years, so why worry about making quality code?
>but if the software isn't performing its basic needs, what are you even shipping?
Something that makes lots of profit, despite being of terrible quality.
I see the following things potentially happen:
#1 Business interruption: due to lack of knowledge an important breaks down and the business can’t do any business. The frequency and impact of such events will eventually trigger a response by management. Could this be have been solved cheaper and easier before? Maybe
#2 Data leaks: since system aren’t secured well enough, data will get lost. The impact of this is hard to measure.
I think both risks are manageable.
Any other consequences I am missing?
Part of the story is that we had a massive confluence of three deflationary pressures through the 90s to present: Labor deflation, Tech deflation, and Resource deflation.
Our biggest bulge in working-age westerners (Boomers) hit their peak skill years in massive numbers, keeping wages for skilled labor low & easy to source. The collapse of the Soviet Union dumped massive quantities of underpriced commodities and mineral resources on western markets, as their high-end manufacturing collapsed. And, shifting manufacturing to China & the far-east kept wages low for decades (on the low end). All of this, combined with the deflationary pressure of technology & automation (increasing worker productivity), brought prices for most goods down dramatically.
But, all of these trends are reversing in the long-term. Wouldn't call it a systems collapse though. Will probably disproportionately affect those on the margins.
This should create a lot of demand for even more systems which increase worker productivity– AI, automation, etc. -- which should be great for all of us in the tech industry, because there aren't a lot of other solutions to the problem (unless you can figure out how to massively lower demand while people are earning more than ever due to skilled labor shortages).
Even with the wage increases we saw in the last couple of years, a majority of these wage gains are probably ahead of us (potentially delayed by any cyclical activity).
It's probably nothing for you to worry about. But, it's likely to be a long-term trend that becomes the new normal for decades to come, and this will shape how we live for a few decades, at least.
It's an opportunity for the younger generation to change how things are done.
Management is not necessarily incompetent for doing this. Good management also tries its best to replace old systems with new technology before the old people are even gone, but you can only do so much given the infinite pessimism from the team members below at all levels of experience as well as leadership higher up.
Anyway... think about driving a car down the road. You're never more than a few seconds from crashing. (How long can you keep your hands off the wheel before trouble comes?) But you don't crash, because you keep steering. In the same way, we're always headed for collapse. Hopefully, we keep steering.
But you can look at this on two levels. On a societal level, yes, we're headed for collapse, like always, and hopefully we keep steering well enough to prevent it. But on a company-by-company level, a bunch of companies are headed for collapse (like always), and some of them will not prevent it (also like always) due to short-term greed or incompetence. (Maybe short-term greed is a kind of incompetence?) As I said, this is like it always is. Companies fail because they don't manage this kind of intergenerational knowledge transfer. It happens, it has happened, and it will continue to happen. That's not "systems collapse", though, unless one company fails that is so critical that the system can't adjust or recover.
Now we do face a population crunch, made worse by many anti-immigration policies, and so that is going to be painful. Same with Boomers pulling their money out of the stock market. But we knew that was coming, and the smart people are ready for it in many ways, I think.
I can imagine that at the beginnings of Bronze Age collapse, immediately following generations deemed the waxings of their elders as merely the anodyne of old age (nostalgia), not real, not lived. After a century or three: not imagined, language and knowledge lost.
The pressure of survival becomes more pressing. True knowledge of the old ways becomes "magic". Those who want to continue to practice the old technical arts wander off, in preference to being scorned or worse stoned.
The revolution will not be televised.
Not everything is in teh cloudz or likely to be in the cloud. The "cloud" is not everywhere (look at some datacenter maps; according to The Register 70% of W EU cloud spend goes to US companies https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/29/aws_microsoft_google_...). There is a real (careful with that word; as in "real estate") notion of sovereignity.
Did you read _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_? What is Defcon / Blackhat? What has the latest "wave (from the coast) that floats all boats" turned out to be? What has it wrought?
When did the meaning of "security" morph from "carefree" to "hypervigilance"? How did it happen? Why did it happen? https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/what-do-we-mean-when-...
Three arrows from the quiver; I have more.
As another commenter observes, you're seldom more than two seconds from disaster when driving a car. It remains to be seen whether the road ends, or rather that people have confused "carefree" with "careless".
Boomers ruin everything.
Next in line will be Gen-X albeit a much smaller group. I can't fault any of the groups, retirement is expected behavior and something we hopefully all get to do. I believe the onus is on the business to plan accordingly. Perhaps even better would be to prioritize documentation and training to be on par with the primary function of the business. This could even be part of business continuity planning. Maybe insurance companies could add this as a line item in their audits.
Since when do businesses proactively plan when there is much more money to be made by whittling down the value-creation change to the bare minimum? In my view, the business meta for the last 50 years has been to strip away useless redundancy in favor of speed[profit] at the behest of shareholders. The result is crystalized value-creation pipelines which are much less robust to shock than their predecessors. Due to their inter-causal dependence and the stochastic nature of shocks(plus the central limit theorem), we get a reoccurring business cycle. It's baked into the system.
Intergenerational antagonism is a frustration redirection mechanism co-oped by the media to replace class-politics for obvious reasons. So much angst and ennui is wasted by diverting away from the ownership class who are made incredibly wealthy from the above and into gen-pilled boomer-haters. It is incredibly effective.
Can we now build buildings that will last as the Coliseum in Rome lasts? Probably not. The people who knew how and why died. All these years later, we've cared enough to investigate, and it turns out to be because we don't use the same sort of volcanic ash those long-dead craftsmen did. But given enough time, we could.
Sounds like you work in an environment that burns people out. That's unfortunate. Fortunately, it's not system-wide. People are still out there doing great work, learning new things, developing new things, and so on.
Same it ever was. Same as it ever shall be. World without end, amen.
