> Initially, the designers wanted to put small changeable batteries in the new glasses. Beskind pointed out to them that old fingers are not that nimble.
I've watched my father change batteries on his hearing aid, and this is very true (he is also 90 with macular degeneration). The hearing aid battery people now sell their batteries in dispensers that make it easier to insert the battery, but they don't help with removing the old dead battery - he has to shake it out over the trash can.
Sometimes he loses his grip and the entire hearing aid ends up in there. Or the battery misses the can and ends up on the floor where he can't see it, and it then acts like a ball-bearing and becomes a fall hazard. So a stupid $2 battery that gets changed a couple times a week could potentially result in a broken hip, which drastically shortens the lives of seniors.
Thinking about the entire life-cycle of a product and how the customers are going to use it is always worthwhile.
>"Well, in the Depression, if you can't buy toys, you make 'em, " she says.
>Beskind has macular degeneration and only has peripheral vision. So she draws her designs with easy-to-see thick black felt pens. She hands me a design for glasses that would help people like her.
Necessity is the mother of all invention. My father also has macular degeneration, and he has developed his own tools and life hacks to assist him. Now I always seem to notice and take interest when someone has macular degeneration, and inevitably people have tools they developed on their own. Just recently an elderly gentleman with macular degeneration came into the law office and when it came time to sign an agreement he pulled out a credit card with a rectangle cut out that he had placed over signature lines so he could feel where to sign.
> That required an engineering degree. In those days, women couldn't get into those departments.
My grandmother worked as a mechanic for the phone company in the 1920's. She met my grandfather, who sold correspondence courses through which one could get a degree, by buying courses in engineering from him.
(In those days, the way to get a degree if you couldn't afford college was to take correspondence courses.)
Yes - I used to work as a product manager in an un-named large tech company (think FB/Google/Apples of the world) that had 2 engineers on my team get surgery.
On my team alone! And they only told me during a team outing where alcohol was involved and their barrier to personal discussion was low. I can't imagine others who are embarrassed at the idea that they needed to get plastic surgery to do a job that they love that should be focused on mental processing / problem solving, not looks.
> In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.1 And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.
> Unsurprisingly, Matarasso has drawn several conclusions from this sociological experiment in miniature. First, the age at which people seek him out is dropping—Matarasso routinely turns away tech workers in their twenties. A few months ago, a 26-year-old came in seeking hair transplants to ward off his looming baldness. “I told him I wouldn’t let him. His hair pattern isn’t even established,” Matarasso said. The techies also place a premium on subtlety. “They’re not walking into their office in front of thirteen-year-old co-workers looking swollen and deformed. They’d rather go slow, do it gradually,” he told me. This helps explain why Fridays are his busiest days for tech-industry patients: They can recover over the weekend and show up Monday morning looking like an ever-so-slightly more youthful version of themselves, as though they’d resorted to nothing more invasive than a Napa getaway.
> Matarasso told me that, in ascending order of popularity, the male techies favor laser treatments to clear up broken blood vessels and skin splotches. Next is a treatment called ultherapy—essentially an ultrasound that tightens the skin. “I’ve had it done of course. I was back at work the next day. There’s zero downtime.” But, as yet, there is no technology that trumps good old-fashioned toxins, the most common treatment for the men of tech. They will go in for a little Botox between the eyes and around the mouth. Like most overachievers, they are preoccupied with the jugular. “Men really like the neck,” Matarasso said, pointing out the spot in my own platysma muscle where he would inject some toxin to firm things up.
Noam interviewed me for that TNR article, but didn't use me directly in it. I suppose I was "background." :-)
Don't get me wrong, he seems like a really good guy, we had a great conversation, and I hope any minor insights of mine were helpful to him. But of course in the end it's an author's call to write the article they want to write.
See, I don't fit the narrative of that article at all. I just turned 63 and have been actively working as a software developer since my teens. [1]
And no, I've never had surgery to look younger. Never even occurred to me!
If somebody thinks I'm too old, no worries, it's their loss. There are plenty of other companies out there who care more about what I can do for them than how I look.
There are even companies who think that some degree of wisdom may come with experience. What a concept! :-)
I've worked with people that have made this claim (to have had surgery). Why would they lie? As another commenter adds, this was disclosed in spirited discussion off hours, when barriers are down.
> This is unsubstantiated. Has anyone met a 40 year-old in Silicon Valley that's gotten plastic surgery?
How many would admit it if they had? It's probably overblown, but last year there were a number of news reports about a boom in cosmetic surgery in the tech sector. It was even on the Colbert Report: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/1ypxfz/silicon-valley-...
I've often thought there is opportunity there for building consumer electronics for older people. Every time daylight savings changed, I would go over to my Great Aunt's place and update the clock on her VCR and make sure all her shows were programmed in to record.
I've also seen her insist her TV wont switch on as she impatiently pounds the on/off button again and again, saying, "See, it's not doing anything!"
I wished the remote had a separate on button and off button, so she could pound that on button as often as she liked until the picture showed up on the TV. Idempotent remotes!
I've watched my father change batteries on his hearing aid, and this is very true (he is also 90 with macular degeneration). The hearing aid battery people now sell their batteries in dispensers that make it easier to insert the battery, but they don't help with removing the old dead battery - he has to shake it out over the trash can.
Sometimes he loses his grip and the entire hearing aid ends up in there. Or the battery misses the can and ends up on the floor where he can't see it, and it then acts like a ball-bearing and becomes a fall hazard. So a stupid $2 battery that gets changed a couple times a week could potentially result in a broken hip, which drastically shortens the lives of seniors.
Thinking about the entire life-cycle of a product and how the customers are going to use it is always worthwhile.