IEEE Spectrum November, 2013 - 24

reflectiONS_BY rOBert W. lUcKY

Good Years for TechnoloGY?
Is the success of an engineering career
determined by birth year?

MalcolM Gladwell, in Outliers (2008), arGues that
one of the factors in success is the year you were born. In technology, he reasons that the perfect year to have been born was 1955,
so that at the start of the computer revolution-which he pegs
as January 1975-you would have been just the right age to take advantage
of the new advances. If you had been born later than 1955, you would still
have been in school when everyone else was capitalizing on the new tech. If
you had been born earlier than 1955, you would probably already have had
a comfortable job at a place like IBM and not have been inclined to strike out
on your own. * In support of this assertion he cites birth years for famous
technologists. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Bechtolsheim, Eric Schmidt, and
Vinod Khosla were born in 1955. Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, and Steve Ballmer
were all born only a year earlier or later. It's an impressive list, but there
are enough counterexamples that I'm inclined to be skeptical. Moreover,
Gladwell's measure of success is wealth, whereas we have had many engineers who through discovery or invention have changed the world without becoming rich. * Nevertheless, I have often contemplated the idea that
there are good times-and not-so-good times-to enter the engineering profession. If we ignore the economic climate and look strictly at technology,
I think there have been times when a field has been fertile and ready for
harvest, and other times when a field has become overworked, with a lot
of hard effort required for ever-diminishing returns.
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OPiNiON

I sometimes think of this in cosmological terms. The universe is expanding at a
rate known as Hubble's constant, whereas
in electrotechnology we have an expansion given by Moore's Law. In cosmology
there is believed to have been an inflationary period after the big bang when space
itself expanded at a tremendous rate. I like
the idea of technology undergoing a similar
rapid expansion at a time like 1975, when
the very space in which we could work expanded explosively.
In cosmology, gravity drives contraction,
while dark energy propels expansion. There
are corresponding forces in technology. Contraction happens as we push against the physical limits of a technology, while expansion is
augmented by the ever-increasing numbers
of engineers worldwide.
Technological inflation, unlike cosmological inflation, however, occurs repeatedly. Certainly the computer revolution was one such
period, but there have been other technologies that sparked transformations, such as the
transistor, the integrated circuit, the Internet,
optics, and wireless. Each breakthrough greatly expanded our working space. So perhaps
a better analogy would be the hypothesis in
evolutionary theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which describes periods of stasis
alternating with periods of sudden change.
Is the current year a good year for technology or a not-so-good year? Frankly, I have no
idea, because we only seem to know these
things in retrospect. When some of us older
engineers get together, we often reminisce
about having enjoyed the "golden years." But
we didn't know at the time how good we had it.
For some years after the transistor had
been invented, engineering schools still
taught students about vacuum tubes. The
integrated circuit was invented in 1958, yet
none of the IEEE Fellows writing about the
future in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1965
mentioned it. The Internet sneaked up on
us even as we were using it. And so forth.
The walls around us had moved outward-
and yet we still felt confined to the smaller
space to which we had become accustomed.
So perhaps in 20 years some columnist
for IEEE Spectrum will write about what
a good year 2013 was. But maybe not. n
ILLUSTRATION by

Dan Page

http://SPectrUm.ieee.OrG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2013