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...
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.
None of these "assets" that are supposedly lost after 30 are a function of age. Yes, there is likely a correlation.
However, even if there is a trend to be observed, the information is only useful to someone trying to select from a group of candidates, and then only if the selector is unable to distinguish between candidates on the basis of the desired characteristics. The trend is of no use to the candidates.
Thinking that you have an advantage simply because you are young is foolhardy. Lamenting that you are at a disadvantage because you are over 30 most likely reveals your lack of fortitude. You either are (and intelligent curious dedicated &rest important-attributes) or you are not.
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?
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.
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? ;)
@ 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.
But in theory it works both ways - older generations might see business opportunities the younger ones are missing. I know I wish I had thought more about certain things when I was younger...
And since society seems to be aging, the advantage might actually be on the side of the older generation.
One might as well equivalently say that younger people are missing out on life (relationships, kids, etc.) by being preoccupied with their online networks.
I think both observations are missing the point that younger and older people have different experiences, and neither is inherently better.
There's nothing stopping adults from getting into the younger scene en masse except a lack of interest. They just have different things they like to do which are no more or less valid.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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".
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.
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.
You know, I practically missed the whole internet for a similar reason. When I was a kid, I screwed around with 1200 baud modems (ATX? ATH? I forget) until I managed to LOG ON to local BBSes. Oh, yeah! You could set that sucker to xModem down a game and have the world's 573rd best tetris clone in just 17 hours (unless your mom picked up the phone--eventually I trained her to ask first.)
Well, it got pretty damn boring. Eventually, I gave up, and when people started talking about AOL, email, etc, I was like "whatever, dude." I didn't actually have an ISP account until...2001 maybe?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it.
There is always an opportunity cost to everything you do, so you can never get all the benefits while avoiding all of the drawbacks; but having been around a while, you get a sense of what's really good and what's not. So you don't need to mess around with every new "technology" and learn from those mistakes, when you can be selective, mess around with better ones, and learn even more valuable lessons.
One of the biggest barriers to learning is psychological resistance. Learning to overcome that is a skill that improves with practice as well. So even assuming our brains aren't as spongy anymore, we learn how to direct them better and can still get as good or better results than when we were less selective and soaked up information indiscriminately.
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.
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...