Age and employment in the Netherlands

Is that across the spectrum of employment or just engineering? Most jobs filled by professional HR departments aren't worth having anyway. The upside could be that HR enforces the same policy on themselves.

There is a general European feeling that reducing the work-week and reducing years worked will somehow create more jobs. Typical leftist thinking, only looking at part of the whole system.

The problem is that many older people are no longer able to do their jobs because they get slow. I've encountered lots of them. If you want to work in a company until your retirement you have two options:

- become an absolute specialist in what you do and keep your knowlegde up-to-date so new employees can learn from you

- move into management

filled by professional HR departments aren't worth having anyway. The upside could be that HR enforces the same policy on themselves.

I've not seen the thesis, but the newspaper report did suggest that this was right across the whole employment spectrum. I've never had the impression that engineers in the Netherlands were treated any worse than any other group - most of the Dutch people I've talked to about this subject I've met through field-hockey, and while this does imply some social selection, it still covers a wide variety of different jobs.

That was true of the Netherlands a couple of decades ago. I don't think that there was anything particularly leftist about it, and nobody admits to thinking like that now.

The problem is more that personnel departments got into the habit of getting rid of expensive elderly employees back when there was a fad for making room for the - cheaper - rising generation, and now - despite the fact that these days the rising generation is a lot less numerous, and we need to keep everybody working for a long as possible - the personnel departments are loath to change their habits.

Nonsense. 60 is the new 40.

That's a myth. I've worked with 60 year-olds than can run circles around younkers.

It's *especially* nonsense in the "keep your knowledge up to date" regions - understanding the basics and building on them is no respecter of age. Once you've seen the same pattern five or six different ways, there's not a lot of surprise left.

SillyValley is predicated on young blood, but those little startups don't hire many people anyway.

The last thing we need is more management. Management is the path to retirement; you're much more likely to be forced into retirement when you go into management. When your "rabbi" goes, so do you.... and in a climate of mergers and a acquisitions...

What we do have is "back pressure" on younger people going into the work force. That's a real problem, and I'd bet it's the source of much of the friction.

-- Les Cargill

Without the need to break a sweat. ;-)

...and burn 'em up.

I'd say it's more of a "vacuum" of skills that are keeping people "at the top" employed. My boss looks for older employees. We have one recent grad (that he inherited - good kid). Everyone else is 45-65.

Those are the exceptions. 99 out of 100 older people I had the work with where terribly slow at picking new things up and getting up to speed. They usually are good at what they know how to do but doing something new or slightly different usually is a big problem.

IF (really big IF) what you know can still be applied... If not then you're out!

Exactly!

Yes..

Very well spoken, indeed..

Jamie.

Well, I can see that in a production (laboring) type of job, however, I don't see a problem why an engineer would fall into that class. Most I've seen have no need to go that route, they use their heads and have some one else do the work for them.

SO something is missing here.

Jamie

Yeah. In engineering, you generally keep accruing value until you're 70 or so, if you do it right. Maybe beyond if you're lucky.

'Course, if you're a "systems engineer" at a defense shop, you'll have less opportunity to stay salty. Still, there are 70 year old systems engineers that can bury younger people.

Yep.

Maybe. I expect hiring a mix is usually a good thing.

-- Les Cargill

I am sorry to hear that. Observer bias is in play, then. New stuff is fun; I can't imagine the appeal of that ever going away.

True enough - although it's pretty infrequent that something so completely revolutionary comes along.

-- Les Cargill

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It varies from person to person. I've been "picking up new things and getting up to speed" all my life - I've always done it better and faster than most. I've not done much of it recently - on account of the absence of people willing to pay for it - but I can still manage it when I feel the need.

Maybe. I can't say that I've noticed that that problem has been age- related in the people I've worked with. Some people are enterprising, others aren't.

Or you've got to learn something new. If you've been in electronics for the last forty years, you've had to learn new stuff every few years anyway, and most of us have got used to it by now.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The US apparently has anti-ageism built into the law. My wife's US (and Australian) colleagues can keep on working as long as they remain competent. Europe still has compulsory retirement at some arbitrary age.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

On a sunny day (Mon, 03 Sep 2012 21:59:59 +0200) it happened Bill Sloman wrote in :

Bill Slowman, first it is spelled 'wijs' and not wisj' (for smart, or wise, or clever, depending on context for example: 'Hij is niet wijs' means he is an idiot (or worse) ). And there Bill, goes you complaining about I dunno what. IF you really wanted to, since you are registered as a company, you COULD change that world, design a good product (not something ancient like a baxandal tone control or whatever, but something NEW, CREATIVE, like the 'Coyote Pregnancy Pill [1]' I invented yesterday, it allows women to get children in just 4 month, great for the working young

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depending on context

I do know this. That was a typo. I got the meaning right in the translation that I appended to the thesis title.

Since you can't spell "Sloman" correctly - despite having the correct spelling visible on the line above - you aren't really in a position to complain.

like a baxandal tone control or whatever,

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working young and you with the Phdee in chemics can make something like that a reality,

e production line.

My Ph.D. is in physical chemistry, not biochemistry or human physiology, but even so I know enough to realise that any attempt to speed up the development of the fetus in utero would probably have much the same kinds of effects as thalidomide, if rather more severe.

Fetal development is a complicated process in which there's a lot of chemical signalling going on - starting with the development of front- to-back asymmetry and getting progressively more complex as the tissues proceed to differentiate further.

One of my acquaintances worked how how the zebra gets its stripes (though his ex-wife claims that he needed a bit of help to get there) when alternate individual cells along the head-to-tail axis (which is defined by a chemical gradient) in the zebra fetus decide that they are going to be either white or black (and different from their next door neighbour).

The exact number of stripes - which differs between zebra species - depends on the number of cells in the fetus when they make their choice.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ideally, sure, but talking with many hiring managers, it's next to impossible to hire good, young, hardware engineers. Seems software is easier to teach/learn.

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Its certainly cheaper to set up a software lab than a hardware lab - good DVMs, oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies and logic analysers cost a lot, and need skilled care.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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My experience has been that there are generally more software engineers than hardware engineers used on a given project. I am sure this is different in different places.

-- Les Cargill