If you’re 40 years old and surrounded by 25-year-olds, you’re an elder.

March 6, 2019 7:48 AM

"Modern Elder Academy is aimed at workers in the digital economy — those who feel like software is speeding up while they are slowing down, no matter how old they really are." - Nellie Bowles, New York Times.
posted by Katemonkey (21 comments total)

At my age it gets so tiring to roll my eyes at stories like this.
posted by ocschwar at 8:10 AM on March 6, 2019 [40 favorites]

The academy thing seems dumb but the age discrimination in tech is real even if it's unintentional.
posted by octothorpe at 8:18 AM on March 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

It is, and I've been spending unreal amounts of time studying things like category theory in order to keep pace with what the industry is doing. And Haskell. And Erlang. And formal methods.

THAT kind of elder academy might even get me enrolling.
posted by ocschwar at 8:25 AM on March 6, 2019 [4 favorites]

"Snaps of agreement came from around the circle. No one else connected with the YouTube stars either, and it was O.K. There was a growing sense of empowerment and camaraderie — almost rebellion. Mr. Conley talked about reclaiming the term elder like the gay community has reclaimed queer."

reclaiming the term elder like the gay community has reclaimed queer
posted by BungaDunga at 8:30 AM on March 6, 2019 [7 favorites]

I'd really like the emphasis to be on changing the culture in tech to not discriminate by age (and race, gender, etc) and not on teaching us olds to adapt.
posted by octothorpe at 8:48 AM on March 6, 2019 [16 favorites]

not on teaching us olds to adapt

I mean - we are in tech - we have been adapting for decades, we are ok with learning new things. However - we are also battle-weary, cynical and have seen many a shiny-new-technical-thing either fail, or become old-news so many times that we are a little wary of changing just for the sake of change.

And... ok, so YouTube is the new mass-media and one has to follow their "starlets"? Yeah, well - I didn't do that in the 80's with MTV and mass consumerist popular culture, why am I about to start now, because it is "new" (actually, isn't the trend off YouTube and onto Insta-pin-WhatAboutAnApp now?)

/old-man-yells-at-cloud

Hmmmm.... although, if I might have ironically called myself a "techgod" in the past, if I enroll in the elder academy, does that now make me an "eldergod"?
posted by jkaczor at 8:59 AM on March 6, 2019 [23 favorites]

Iä, it does.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:29 AM on March 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

Our midlife students are: between age 35-75 (mostly)

The upper end of that range is really pushing the definition of midlife.
posted by Fig at 10:12 AM on March 6, 2019 [11 favorites]

Sounds more like a spa for folks that either can't make themselves take a vacation or can weasel their work to "pay for education", additionally available: Reiki, shamanic sessions, horseback riding, surfing lessons.

The term 'elder' also has a connotation of young guys in slacks, white shirts with skinny black ties wandering the streets carrying the book of mormon.

Changing tech would be good but probably a quixotic effort, but buzz wordish abstraction of an abstraction layered on plain old javascript but "cool" is both codewordy and a intended barrier to entry. Another 'but' folks that have been in a stable niche (ruby, java, even cobol) do struggle to be familiar with newer idioms, at the core it's still "input, transform, output" but each of those elements is does have clever tools and abstractions that hide a lot of boilerplate. Now some ultra advanced is... well take hadoop, I seen it observed that 80% corporate installations are to have the term on PR materials more than actually used in a useful way. But it's true standing of a serverless VM of a few thousand nodes has different details in many ways than a dozen windows servers.
posted by sammyo at 10:23 AM on March 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

The young people I work with just describe me as "grumpy old fuck." I take it as "elder."
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:29 AM on March 6, 2019 [8 favorites]

I wonder if there is any good writing on the culture of earlier tech booms, say 17th and 19th century and whether they had the same cult of youth or if the trope of the 17 year old billionaire is the result of decades of hyper consumerism and marketing, or some kind of backlash against the creation of teenagerdom.
posted by Pembquist at 10:35 AM on March 6, 2019 [2 favorites]

"Evolve: strategically editing your historical identity and mining your mastery"

Open your resume and remove when you went to college and your perl and Actionscript skills

"Learn: strive for a beginner’s mind that allows you to be both a mentor and intern"

function sq(x) { return x*x } is now x => x*x

Collaborate: use your EQ and team building skills to create more successful partnerships

Watch more YT

Counsel: tap into your “know-how” and “know-who” and your role as a confidant and coach

Try in vain to convince new engineers not to do complete code rewrites on working code just because
posted by gwint at 10:49 AM on March 6, 2019 [12 favorites]

TUITION AND SCHOLARSHIPS
MEA tuition is $5,000 ($3,500 per person shared room) for a one-week workshop, and $10,000 ($7,000 per person shared room) for our two-week Immersion Program. Upon acceptance, applicants must deposit 50% with the balance due thirty days prior to attendance. We are accepting applications for full tuition and scholarship placement. MEA is a social enterprise and committed to socio-economic diversity. We offer scholarships – from 50% to 100% of tuition, room and board based on need – with a nominal commitment fee.
LOCATION
Less than an hour's drive north of the resort city of Cabo San Lucas, El Pescadero is in a safe, rural part of Baja California Sur, Mexico.

So, this is aimed at "workers in the digital economy" who can afford to pay several thousand dollars, take a week or two off work, and have a passport. (They mention a "gap year" several times.)

we don’t yet have enough data to tell you what percentage of applicants are selected, but given the small size of our workshop cohorts (12-18 students), we can tell you it is a competitive process to be accepted. While we seek students who are in transition, are curious about learning and evolving, and have an aptitude for being in intimate groups, we also look closely at how we’ll create a diversity of experience and opinion in each cohort. So there’s no set of specific rules that define who gets in and who doesn’t.

So, ah... "we're looking for extroverts, and while we don't require them to be white extroverts, we do skew heavily toward 'people that the admissions board would get along with.' But don't worry; the word 'diversity' is right there in the description, so you can tell we're open-minded and don't need to gather any actual numbers about what categories of attendees we accept."

Also, is it just me, or is "diversity of opinion" code for "alt-right techbros welcome?" Because it really, really doesn't look like it means "feminist socialists can learn how to put those ideologies in action in the workplace."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:54 AM on March 6, 2019 [10 favorites]

Perhaps it's subversive... if you give DudeBros enough Reiki they become SJW coders... nu?
posted by sammyo at 11:32 AM on March 6, 2019

Also, is it just me, or is "diversity of opinion" code for "alt-right techbros welcome?"

If it's ever been used in another way, I haven't seen it, no.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:47 AM on March 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

Threads like this make me glad I work in a shop where C++11 features are the hot new thing, we still have code that dates to the early 80s (some in FORTRAN) and at 47 I'm not an "elder."
posted by Foosnark at 12:53 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'd say 10 years ago at a top CS department I had a professor say in class that category theory was new area and a complex topic but basically in no way suggested it was a necessary part of undergrad CS education. It's interesting that now it's shifted to everyone thinks its important.

It's interesting how formal methods and AI as research areas have been around a long time; it's only through practical successes like SAT solvers or machine learning that only then do they renew mainstream attention and you have everyone suddenly desiring to learn about it.
posted by polymodus at 1:00 PM on March 6, 2019

it's only through practical successes

Well - I also think it has to do with access to extremely large datasets - and "as-needed" scalable cloud computing resources - so you don't actually have to buy/build/maintain your own cluster (... supercomputer for us oldies...)
posted by jkaczor at 1:44 PM on March 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

While we seek students who are in transition, are curious about learning and evolving, and have an aptitude for being in intimate groups, we also look closely at how we’ll create a diversity of experience and opinion in each cohort.

There's a lot of touching going on in that photo - hands on knees, hands on necks, two people snuggling in one chair. It seems a bit of a theme.

I'm all for embracing elderdom and changing the culture to do likewise, but this seems 95% boho-hippie indulgence and 5% anything practical. Fine if you're into that kind of thing but I would not call it an 'academy'.
posted by andraste at 2:27 PM on March 6, 2019 [5 favorites]

The shaman blessing ceremony would be Tuesday morning, he said, and there was an option for private sessions that he highly recommended. (These involved sitting on a cliff and screaming.)

Organized yelling at clouds!
posted by BungaDunga at 3:10 PM on March 6, 2019 [7 favorites]

Escaped the Bay Area Event Horizon in the 80's, but it's all coming back to me now. Shaman on staff? Woo-meter is pegged.
posted by skippyhacker at 4:19 PM on March 6, 2019