Longevity

Planned Obsolescence Isn't a Bug; It's a Feature

The longer I’m in this field and the older I get, the more I feel that this is more than a job, or even a career; it’s akin to a vocation. It’s a life-long calling. Naturally, part of any calling is helping “the kids”, newbies, etc.

If you live long enough to become a greybeard, past college, decades of junk food, a sedentary lifestyle, all night coding sessions, all weekend troubleshooting sessions and the countless on-call pages, you’ll eventually start to become obsolete yourself. There’s no shame in it. You aren’t as sharp or focused as a twenty-something with no obligations or kids. So you’ll direct your efforts toward the ten thousand foot view, because you know that time is finite; you feel it in your bones. You’ll know when and when not to pull the trigger on something on a Friday at 4:45 PM because you know weekends are for resting and reflection.

While you won’t know the latest tech fad or newest programming language the moment it hits a mailing list or Github, you’ll have something infinitely more important: wisdom. Here is where lots of old-timers make a critical mistake; they hoard knowledge, thinking it’ll make them indispensable. They’re almost always proven wrong in that belief, but you don’t have to be. Gather your wisdom and blog, write a book, podcast, whatever your chosen medium. Pass on what you have learned to the guys in the trenches. They need guidance, runbooks, and an up to date knowledge base when they get that inevitable 3 AM page out. They need wisdom and a steady hand when everything is on fire. Give them that, and they’ll appreciate it much more than telling stories around the energy drink fridge/coffee pot (let’s face it: you’re not standing near the water cooler). Don’t delay or skip this process.

The tech industry is going through a bit of an upheaval at the moment and everything is upside-down. However, there are axioms that have stood the test of time (for good reason), and this is one of them: there’s a place for greybeards in every organization that wants to last. The ones that don’t will be the first ones to push the old-timers out.