Ask HN: Are we in the midst of a systems collapse?

37 points by geeky4qwerty 3 years ago | 32 comments

EDIT - My TL;DR is merely a cynical joke based on my experiences and conversations around the oft used scapegoat of all problems faced today. Please don't take it at face value.

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?

dang 3 years ago |

> TL;DR - Boomers ruin everything.

None of this here, please. If anything ruins everything, it's flamebait, and generational flamebait is particularly avoidable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

geeky4qwerty 3 years ago | |

My apologies I was not meaning to be flamebaity and actually put that "boomers ruin everything" in as a joke.

dang 3 years ago | | |

Appreciated!

stephc_int13 3 years ago |

My 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.

Comevius 3 years ago |

This 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 that avoided consolidation for a long time, just no longer.

coldpie 3 years ago | |

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.

b20000 3 years ago |

leetcode 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.

shmatt 3 years ago | |

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

b20000 3 years ago | | |

passing leetcode interviews does not guarantee the creation of actually usable code or the creation of the right solution for the problems at hand

mmastrac 3 years ago |

I'm feeling something similar. I've been on sabbatical on and off for a few years, dipping my toes into the market to see what things are like professionally and it's been eye-openingly terrible. "Title inflation" has made the "senior" level a virtually worthless designation, and it appears like even "staff" engineers are going that way.

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?

midoridensha 3 years ago | |

>There's no thought put into long-term stability or serviceability of software.

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.

baxtr 3 years ago |

I think for thinking this through it is crucial to think in “consequences”. We get these by asking “what would be the business impact of this”?

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?

rawgabbit 3 years ago |

That’s the story of my professional career. I was often the “lucky” one who didn’t get laid off or forced out and was tasked to keep the hot pile of tech garbage running. In my case after a couple of swings at bat by very expensive and different consulting companies, the CEO eventually gets fired. The traumatized like me say never again and we gladly tell the likes of Salesforce to please take our money and please leave a little of our budget to pay our salaries. Sigh.

futhey 3 years ago |

Boomers hit peak retirement in the 2020s. That should mean unemployment will continue to stay low, wages will continue to rise, and that will all put pressure on inflation for a long time, along with Russian mineral resources falling off the market, and overseas labor costs appreciating (higher wages in developed markets where labor and manufacturing have already been outsourced, mainly China & India).

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.

sublinear 3 years ago |

I don't agree.

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.

d23 3 years ago |

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.

AnimalMuppet 3 years ago |

Boomers ruin everything by retiring? I thought the story was that they were ruining everything by not retiring, thereby not giving chances for younger workers to move 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.

zer0tonin 3 years ago |

I 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.

hirundo 3 years ago |

The graveyards are full of indispensable men. – De Gaulle

gilbetron 3 years ago |

I mostly see it as an opportunity for younger companies to have a chance against the bloated old companies. As a solid Gen Xer, most < 40 year olds I've been working with the past decade are really, really capable. Scarily so at times, but it makes sense because they've been exposed to far more information and education than ever. Those that take advantage of it are tremendous.

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.

m3047 3 years ago |

Please explain what "Boomers ruin everything" has to do with the rest of your question.

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.

geeky4qwerty 3 years ago | |

I was being tongue-in-cheek, the "blame boomers" trope is pretty well worn and I was merely making fun of that.

m3047 3 years ago | | |

Ok. Personally I'm tired of voicing unpopular opinions to people who don't want to hear them. (Guess my age.)

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".

Bender 3 years ago |

FWIW 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, 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.

PaulHoule 3 years ago | |

It would be nice to see some boomers retire from politics. The U.S. sometimes looks like a Soviet-style gerontocracy and China seems to be going the same way now that Xi gave himself a third term.

LinuxBender 3 years ago | | |

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.

kelseyfrog 3 years ago | |

> 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.

pwinnski 3 years ago |

People get older and retire or die, and their knowledge is lost. So it has always been, and so it shall ever be. Somehow, we survive.

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.