Why innovators get better with age

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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)

One problem: What is innovation?<p>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.<p>Nothing wrong with either scenario.

amazingly content free article. disappointing read.

I recently read another article on HN that said innovation got worse with age and responsibilities like kids etc, does anyone remember it?<p>I think it depends on what industry you are in, but I have seen old guys build bad ideas too

The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery generally takes time.<p>For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early twenties. Arguably they get worse with age.

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

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

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Being an author works much the same way.<p>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.