Too old for this Shit

The skills that made you hireable today will be half-obsolete by 2027. Two small nations are leading the fight against this new form of economic entropy.

THIRTY MONTHS. That is how long it takes for half of a software developer's hard-won expertise to become as helpful as a Nokia flip phone. This alarming statistic, courtesy of Harvard Business Review research, has transformed the talent strategies of ambitious scale-ups from Singapore's gleaming towers to Amsterdam's converted warehouses.

Consider the mathematics of futility: a company investing $2m in training its technical team today can expect half that knowledge to depreciate faster than a luxury car. Yet unlike automobiles, skills cannot be traded in—they simply evaporate, leaving behind expensive ghosts of relevance.

This phenomenon, which we might call "the great skills decay," has created an unlikely alliance of anxiety between two nations separated by 10,000 kilometres but united by identical nightmares. Both Singapore and the Netherlands find themselves racing against an economic clock that appears to tick faster with each passing quarter.

Leave a Comment