Experience and perspective

An engineer in the late thirties told me that tehcnology is changing so fast in this field that it is difficult for him to keep up and compete with the young engineers that are trained in the new technology.

I asked him to focus on his strenghs, which are the experience and perspective that he has gained over the years, rather than to compete in his areas of weakness.

I posed him a problem of how to write an algorithm to compare one image with another image and see if they fit. The images are formed from the tangram pieces. We discussed several options, including comparing pixels by pixels, but he pointed out that this would take too much power and would drain the battery of the mobile phone.

He then suggested an approach, taken from a previous project. Instead of comparing every pixel, the program could compare every 10th pixel across and down. This would reduce the comparison by the factor of 100 to 1, and would still produce the same answer. It was an excellent solution to a problem that had bugged me for a long time.

I wish to quote this example to encourage the older people that your experience and perspective is valuable, but you have to use it effectively. Instead of competing with younger people in new technology, the older people can use their experience and perspective to guide the young, and can continue to play a useful role in the business.

Tan Kin Lian