Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

To understand a non-sensical decision, consider the age of the person deciding.

It was the early 1990s (yes, I am that old), we were using Cray and other supercomputers (government program, so we had several), and we were interviewing your programmers. They all gasped to learn that we were programming in FORTRAN (not Java or C++ or some other such thing). The reason was simple. Cray sold supercomputers to people who were in their 40s and 50s. Those people programmed in FORTRAN back when they programmed.

The age of the people deciding things explains much about their decisions. For several decades, I worked for the government in various locations in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. I never understood the locations of the buildings we used, until I realized who decided the locations. The buildings were too far “in” for people my age. The buildings, however, were in the neighborhoods of the people who decided the locations. They were 20 or 30 years older. When they were the house-buying age, they bought in what were at the time the “outer” suburbs. They picked office buildings close to their homes, but these buildings were “inner” compared to the younger employees.

Congress often makes what seem to be non-sensical decisions. Consider the age of the members of Congress. The decisions start to make sense.

Why do these people decide on things that are decades too old? Because they are several decades older. If you want to influence those “deciders,” talk to them about the people affected by their decisions. They usually forget about the younger people.