Some of our top talent is over 60, and that's in an industry where supposedly you're dead at 50 (unlike the legal profession or academia).

There is a longstanding canard that older workers get pushed out or sidelined or not hired, but I believe this is correlation and not causation. Actually, it is causation, but the cause isn't "oldness." It's an unwillingness to keep growing one's skill set.

Some people are content to do the same job at 55 that they had at 30, and they want to keep doing it forever, collecting small pay increases every year. There's a diminishing return on experience in the same role, though, and soon you have someone who could be replaced for a lot less. And yeah, that person's going to be younger for obvious reasons.

I know older employees who have stagnated and probably are on their way out, because they built a product 15 years ago and expect to keep coasting on that forever. You always have to be climbing and working on something new.

Ok. Yes productivity is all well and good but I have found that 50 and 60+ can be incredibly difficult to manage and consistently seem to bully, outright dismiss or refuse (!) to help the younger employees. For the women the productivity is limited to what they have been doing for 15+ years and you can't get them to do it differently (these are usually admins).

The men are much better...to me a woman but.. you get a young, man with inherent talent and they aren't usually so cooperative.

Hearing how awful the younger employees are simply because they are millennials isn't conducive to a healthy work environment.

BTW I worked with nothing but LA Hipster designers on a large project and they were absolutely wonderful, polite, hard working, and passionate.

The national precision pistol championship at Camp Perry Ohio last week, was won by Phil Hemphill, who is 64 years old. This was his second win.

It was an extremely difficult year with lots of wind, and heat. He was helped by both his psychological maturity, and his size. He is a really big and strong man.

So despite every attempt to classify, categorize, segregate and generalize, people are individuals. Stop the presses.

I'm still working because I'm still learning. I'm still learning because I'm not dead.

or refuse (!) to help the younger employees

As an older person, I can see that. I don't want to train my replacement who'll make less than I do for the same job.

If it were your company, I would guess you wouldn't let me go, especially if I got you to put in writing. But a corporation? they'd get something to stick and ditch me in a heart beat.

For the women the productivity is limited to what they have been doing for 15+ years and you can't get them to do it differently

Maybe you need to show them that the new way is not just better, but much better? that's why I came to loathe Windows 8: they changed the paradigm that software vendors have been pushing the better part of 40 years for no discernable increase in productivity. If anything, it was a regression.

Seems they figured that out, since Win10 has the Start menu back.

It's no surprise that Millennials are difficult to employ, but this is only partially their own fault. We've been in recession for a decade, and constant growth in government-mandated cost of employment discourages businesses from hiring employees who aren't already known quantities. A lot of Millennials come out of school mal-educated (despite the horrendous amounts of student loans they are stuck with); they are difficult to train because they haven't been taught how to learn, and this is all happening as the cost of paying employees to train on the job is going up. They also haven't been taught how to deal with the ups and downs that occur in just about any job environment, and so they often react to problems in ways that are counter-productive. This can all be fixed in time, but today, employers don't have time. It's too expensive. They need employees who can step in and be productive right away.

A trap that you can fall into as an older and more experienced employee is trying to dictate implementations rather than instructing in principles. I was a software engineer working on NASA programs in the early 1990s. The company I worked for had a consultant who went back to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era. He was always pooh-poohing things that we did because we didn't do them the same as back in his day, but he never explained why. He just dissed it for being different, without taking into account all of the changes in technology, operations, and mission statements since them. As we learned, there were actually important reasons why his generation had done some of the things the way they did, which we should have considered in drawing up our designs. But he never explained any of that to us. He left us to find it out for ourselves, the hard way.

He was always pooh-poohing things that we did because we didn't do them the same as back in his day, but he never explained why.

Did it occur anyone to ask him why things were done the way they were? or did he simply not share even when asked?

Age 65 for retirement was never about physical capability. People retire when they can afford to not work. It is about money and that is all it has ever been about.

In 1935 when social security was established age 65 was thought to be an actuarial affordable retirement age. I.e. the system could afford to let people retire at that point. In reality it was a tossup between 65 and 70 and 65 was used to increase the political support. Back in 1935 the life expectancy 60. I.e. half of the people would be dead by then. So over 50% of the people who paid into SS would never get any benefits from it. Today the life expectancy is 80. So those financial calculations are no longer valid.

Once again, this has nothing to do with physical or mental capabilities. It is all about money and savings.

My mother thought about retiring at 70; she manages leases for a man who has a bunch of commercial properties. Thing is, she's been doing it for him so long (and for his father before him) that training a new person would be nearly impossible -- and all the tenants know her.

So he convinced her to stay part-time (for more than 50 percent of her salary). Continued to pay benefits. Eventually he set up an office in her house with high-speed Internet and phone forwarding (so that no one who called the office would know she was actually at home). Every year a couple of presents arrive -- a big-screen TV, a sound system, upgrades for her airline tickets.

The lesson I learned is to make yourself irreplaceable, either in knowledge, loyalty or -- preferably -- both. There are no guarantees, of course, but if you're easily replaced by even an adequate substitute, you likely will be at some point.

"He was always pooh-poohing things that we did because we didn't do them the same as back in his day, but he never explained why."

I worked quite a few years in our Standards Department and it became apparent that new employees wanted to be given the answer rather than do the time consuming work to "prove" the answer by showing the advantages/disadvantages of different ways of doing things.

My answers became shorter and less detailed once I saw that my "answers" were passed on as "correct" w/o any effort on their part to prove them correct. There's a reason it takes time to "answer" a question or determine what's adequate practice.

My supervisors knew even less than the new employees and only wanted an answer that made this quarter's numbers look good. So the handwriting was on the wall as far as long-term employment.

Not saying this is applicable to you but it sure was apparent to me and other senior staff back then.

6% is not a very big part of the workforce. I would bet that their figures don't count part-time workers, the self-employed, or business owners. My parents were artists and were still working part-time at 80+.
Of course, some people do give up and quit trying (or burn out?) long before 65. Some academics quit publishing as soon as they get tenure.

Cathy Young has just posted this:

https://www.allthink.com/1488357

Wrong thread for the Cathy Young link. Please ignore unless you're interested in the Milo discussion.

Grandma may also be a little less into chasing the boys than the 20-something employee.

I'm sure Grandma also doesn't spend a good chunk of time on the job absorbed in her smart phone.

JD, Candy Crush was the new Bingo!

"Did it occur anyone to ask him why things were done the way they were? "

We'd ask. We never got much explanation. The impression we developed was that he had been a pencil-pusher, someone who executed the procedures as written without much understanding of why the procedures were written that way. I used to ask him questions about the development of NASA's tracking network and why it was necessary to do certain things that seemed to be unnecessarily bureaucratic. I never got anything beyond "this is the way the system works; you have to do it this way or the system doesn't work". The answers were circular. It wasn't until later, when I was able to research the development of the tracking networks myself, that I started to realize what the technological and physical (and budgetary) limitations were that required certain high-overhead procedures. This was at a point where NASA was transitioning from the old ground-station tracking networks to the satellite-based TDRS system, and the changeover in technology was making a lot of the old ways of doing things no longer functional.

"I worked quite a few years in our Standards Department and it became apparent that new employees wanted to be given the answer rather than do the time consuming work to 'prove' the answer by showing the advantages/disadvantages of different ways of doing things. "

I get your point, and I won't claim that there wasn't any youthful arrogance involved. And there is value sometimes in having to learn it on your own to see how things actually work. But you still need guidance for that. "Figure it out for yourself" is a dangerous game to play in a business where mistakes can get people killed.