I suspect this sort of behavior is one of the contributing factors that leads to the internal rot that brings companies down over the long run. Then a competitor comes along and runs laps around them and seals the deal. But monopolistic and scale forces take a while to overcome, so I think it takes a while for it to fully play out.
Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
11–20 of 35 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#12leetcode hiring processes and management style of the past 20 years have dismissed the importance of experience and wisdom, so yes, there is a high probability that we will see the effects of that in the coming years.
I feel like the LeetCode companies are currently the loudest about preaching to employees about having dead weight / needing more PIPs / a lot of people don't need to be here.
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
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#13This is similar to the crisis private business owners face when they are too old to run their businesses. Many owners want their children to take over, but they are either reluctant, incompetent or both. It's always a shit show, and the business is sold eventually to a bigger company. This is happening all over, but the funeral industry is especially affected these days. I guess because it's mostly family businesses…
There does seem to be this pattern of older people refusing to pass the torch until it's too late. I figure when you're in your last working decade (55~65), you ought to be focusing on finding new people to keep the train running and transferring knowledge and power on to them so you can exit the workforce and enjoy your retirement. Instead it seems many choose to hold on to every scrap of power until well after they're able to effectively pass things on, at which point there is no one prepared to pass things on to, leaving everyone involved miserable, including the owner, their employees, and their customers. I don't know if this is a generational thing, or just one of those properties of humanity.
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#14> TL;DR - Boomers ruin everything.
None of this here, please. If anything ruins everything, it's flamebait, and generational flamebait is particularly avoidable.
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#15My hypothesis is that this knowledge loss is both widespread and underestimated, but that it is most of the time compensated by innovation.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support term limits for non-elected government staff positions. 20 years and forced retirement with a nice severance/retirement package with the agreement they will not enter into a civilian career that benefits from their former position? i.e. attempt to prevent the creation of collusion, kickbacks and some bribery prior to retirement.
I dunno. I know a person who is an advocate for nuclear energy, who sincerely believes that it is "the power to save the world". He was an officer in the nuclear navy and spent some time working in procurement of naval reactors. When he retired from the navy he got a job working on small reactors (a subject that he's been passionate about) at a vendor that supplies naval reactors. The "revolving door" can have the ap…
I agree. What I mean is there needs to be something to prevent collusion and kickbacks. Maybe a group that follows up on former government officials to see if they influenced legislation that would then benefit them or their buddies. There must be something like this already, some type of anti-corruption group, assuming it has not been corrupted.
So to use your example, if your Navy friend passed laws or voted on laws or were part of a government org that removed obstacles for a private nuclear company and then joined that company receiving a nice hiring bonus that should be investigated as corruption.
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#17I don't think the burnout epidemic can be in anyway blamed on boomers retiring. I would rather point fingers at poor management practices, hustle culture and generally increased life stressed for younger generations due to lower real salaries, a constant influx of bad news and lifelong student/housing debts.
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#18The graveyards are full of indispensable men. – De Gaulle
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#19[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?
#20FWIW economists have known since the 60's that Boomers would be retiring in large numbers around now. This makes me curious why businesses have not been proactively planning for this somehow . Is there a gap in business processes that excludes economics? Is this something taught in business school? Boomers ruin everything. Next in line will be Gen-X albeit a much smaller group. I can't fault any of the groups, retire…
> This makes me curious why businesses have not been proactively planning for this somehow.
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.