For kicks, I'm going to throw out a possibly odd analogy.
The length of a string determines how quickly it vibrates (assuming tension is the same). Shorter strings vibrate faster than long strings. If you're in a noisy environment and you want to make sense of all of the chaotic sounds around you, one way to do it would be to take a bunch of strings of different lengths (say a piano) and see which ones resonate more than others. The gentle ringing of those piano strings, some louder than others, tells you which frequencies are more dominant in the surrounding acoustic environment, because they cause their matching strings to resonate more.
As I get older (I'm in my forties), I feel like a lengthening string. When I was a twenty-something programmer, I could tell you how things had changed over a year or two, but trends or cycles on longer timescales than that were hidden to me. Now I know what a decade or two feels like and can see and intuitively sense cycles of that scale. At the same time, shorter trends are harder for me to pick up on now. It feels like noise or beneath my notice.
Having people of different ages in your organization is incredibly value because they all resonate at different time scales like this and help you pick up chronological patterns at frequencies you'd otherwise miss.
This is a good observation. I'm in my late 50s and more and more I keep getting the feeling "I've seen this (or something very similar) before" whether having to do with software development trends, politics, fashions etc. That old adage about there being nothing new under the sun didn't make much sense to me when I was younger, but now it seems to often ring true.
One of the things that I like about this analogy is that it also points out one of the pitfalls as we age. As our string gets longer, we aren't as good as picking up the higher frequency vibrations, so we risk assuming they aren't there at all.
A failure mode I see of some older developers is assuming there's nothing new under the sun and nothing worth learning, which I don't think is the case. I think it just gets harder for us to see those short term trends.
The analogy might be a bit weak on the short side: Higher frequency means that the thing comes and goes within a short amount of time. Did I really need to learn a technology that was only in vogue for a few years?
Another analogy I've heard (I think it was from Ward Cunningham) is that technology comes in waves. You don't need to catch every wave - trying to do so will tire you out. A good surfer learns to be choosy about the waves they catch and that comes with experience.
> Higher frequency means that the thing comes and goes within a short amount of time.
Not every change is cyclic, so you risk being unable to respond quickly to fast permanent changes if you don't acknowledge a change until a sufficient amount of time has passed.
Great analogy! I'll be mulling this one over for sure in the coming weeks/months.
I've got a couple of similar aging analogies/models (also in my forties) that tend to come to mind when I'm confronted with these sorts of topics, namely physical speed.
When we're young, we move slowly, crawling, then walking and running. The things we notice and care about tend to be smaller and more detailed. Walking home in elementary school, I knew every crack in the sidewalk, every brick in the retaining wall, every tree limb, every slope of every yard.
Then came the bike, and greater speed, then the car. More frequently in adulthood are the planes. Now I barely notice the fine details of what I pass by, but my awareness of city-scale things, both at home and abroad, has filled in...the streets, rivers, buildings, and the development that spans miles and miles that were far beyond my grasp when I moved slower. It's a bigger, more complete picture, but I can't zoom into it.
I often miss the slowness of my youth. I remember vividly being enraptured by the mundane details of my backyard, the roots of big pine trees, lush grassy spots, the cracked patio. So many tiny, "up close" details that were so interesting to look at, and run GI Joes and matchbox cars over for hours.
Building software is the same. Most of my giddy memories of discovery and productivity were in the "slow" phase of my career, when my tasks and responsibilities were fewer and closer to the ground, so to speak. The code itself. Now that I can travel faster, I have a larger number of more impactful responsibilities, but I don't feel that closeness or giddiness. I'm rarely enamored by the solutions that I churn out.
It's interesting that you pretty much described a physical "discrete Fourier transform". Our cochlea works this way with different length hairs attached to nerves to hear different frequency ranges and old harmonic analyzers were build with this principle.
It's not a coincidence. :) My quarantine hobby has been getting into music, audio programming, and electronics, so I very much have Fourier analysis on the mind.
When I was a young engineer, I would be aware of the project I was working on, and the technical details. But nowadays I work on the level where I have to be aware of macro economics trends: I am tracking how different countries will be recovering from Covid19, how adjacent industries are doing, how the US-China trade war is affecting technology exports. My understanding of technology goes as far as performance metrics, value prop, schedule. I no longer have the time or inclination to dig into technical details, I leave that to the youngsters.
yeah, definitely feels like people of different ages tuned/trained their pattern recognition engine biases at certain interest/point/threshold based on their experience/reward
The length of a string determines how quickly it vibrates (assuming tension is the same). Shorter strings vibrate faster than long strings. If you're in a noisy environment and you want to make sense of all of the chaotic sounds around you, one way to do it would be to take a bunch of strings of different lengths (say a piano) and see which ones resonate more than others. The gentle ringing of those piano strings, some louder than others, tells you which frequencies are more dominant in the surrounding acoustic environment, because they cause their matching strings to resonate more.
As I get older (I'm in my forties), I feel like a lengthening string. When I was a twenty-something programmer, I could tell you how things had changed over a year or two, but trends or cycles on longer timescales than that were hidden to me. Now I know what a decade or two feels like and can see and intuitively sense cycles of that scale. At the same time, shorter trends are harder for me to pick up on now. It feels like noise or beneath my notice.
Having people of different ages in your organization is incredibly value because they all resonate at different time scales like this and help you pick up chronological patterns at frequencies you'd otherwise miss.