I was at two companies that aged out. They’d had a hiring surge in the sixties and the bulk of their employees were held there by generous benefits and a defined benefit retirement system. As older employees saw new people coming in, they refused to pass along the knowledge that might let those employees replace them, even though they’d eventually retire, and their jobs would go unfilled. Both companies ended up making ass layoffs to get rid of older workers. Some programs and projects were lost because the people who knew how to make the items were now gone. But the companies had hired younger workers and, at this point, done away with the defined benefit retirement meaning people were going to leave more regularly and be replaced by younger workers. In both cases it was necessary but handled badly...probably because of union rules and labor agreements. Also, I think the people running the companies didn’t understand how to create processes and institutional knowledge. They were accountants and lawyers.
“ Also, I think the people running the companies didn’t understand how to create processes and institutional knowledge. They were accountants and lawyers.”
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There’s a whole lot of this happening across our nation.
I wonder if some of this failure was because they were
trying to make robots build tools that were designed to
be built by hand instead of making tools that were designed
to be built by robots?