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The Generation Gap in Your Office

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Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#11

Post by tjmaxal »

OliverSmith wrote: post #8
WillyF wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the reason that older people in management are slow to adopt new technology has little to do with their generations. It has more to do with the fact that their time is extremely valuable and they don't have a lot of it. Investing time in learning new technology just isn't worth it for them. I've seen plenty of older people who are unemployed adopting social media and other new technology. Their time isn't…

So when I go to management and let them know that I've spent my less valuable time and figured out a way to speed up our process, they should then either trust me and let me implement it, or spend the time and evaluate for themselves if I'm correct. When management says their time is too valuable to learn how to do their job more efficiently, they're just bad managers. It would be like a programmer entering a bunch o…

It depends on whether you work in company that rewards age over innovation or innovation over everything else. In a pure meritocracy it's what you do that matters not who you are. However every large company I've ever worked for has rewarded people more based on who they are instead of what they do.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#12

Post by tiffani »

emarcotte wrote: post #9

I'm in a very small company. I am the youngest employee. I'm not certain of the exact age difference, but I suspect I'm on the order of 25 years younger than the next youngest employee. This company was founded by people who all worked at another place and started their own show. They are all doing things they would never have dreamed of doing 3 years ago, let alone 10. There is blogging, talk of twitter, talk of fac…

Indeed, I'm the youngest person at this particular office and I dread going to group lunches and having to hear about husbands, kids, mortgage payments, and other stuff I just don't deal with at this point.

The biggest thing for me is having to pretend...this false maturity is tiring. Definitely not a good sign, but yeah. At least, around folks your own age you can let loose a bit.

On the other hand, having older folks around (who are the same ages of my parents in my case), gives me room for lots of great advice about the stuff I don't care about now like kids, houses, cars, etc. from folks that aren't my parents.

It's a balancing act--be sure to keep up with folks your age outside the office. And when you're at work, if you can, catch up with somebody who's like-minded, even if they're older...they're not mutually-exclusive.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#13

Post by astine »

Historically, shifts in enterprise communication happen every 20 years, and with the millennial generation, this shift will be from email to activity streams.

As a 'millenial', for actual business communication, I strongly prefer email.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#14

Post by OliverSmith »

astine wrote: post #13

Historically, shifts in enterprise communication happen every 20 years, and with the millennial generation, this shift will be from email to activity streams. As a 'millenial', for actual business communication, I strongly prefer email.

I think as long as you have separate streams, they can be much more powerful and useful than email. Think about github and trac. Both have a type of stream to condense information that would be too much for email. Obviously, no one wants to actually integrate facebook with their business communications.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#15

Post by kscaldef »

OliverSmith wrote: post #3
WillyF wrote: post #2

As someone who runs a startup in the entry level careers space, I am so tired of people talking about generational differences, Gen-Y, Millennials, etc. I think the vast majority of it is crap. I don't disagree with the conclusion that we will see a shift in workplace technology, but it would be stupid to disagree with that conclusion. Workplace communication technology is constantly evolving and improving. Workplace…

As someone who just graduated from college and now working in a large company, this generation gap is extremely apparent. I understand that as a whole workplace technology is evolving, but it definitely takes a bit too long to catch on at larger companies with older people in management that don't understand the newer technology. The only way I can see to fix it (fast enough) is to start new companies and let the old…

Something that annoys me both about this article and your comment is this idea that there's something unique about the current generational dynamic. Do you really think that every new college graduate hasn't said the same thing you're saying now? This isn't about "millenials" and "boomers", it's about young (excited, ambitious, energetic, inexperienced, immature, naive) people and old (experienced, accomplished, responsible, "big-picture", cynical, bored, scared) people.

From the article, this stood out:

> Millennials strive to find work that is personally fulfilling, provides opportunities to make new friends, learn news skills, and be a part of a larger purpose.

How condescending is that? As if no previous generation every wanted to do work that was fulfilling and served a larger purpose.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#16

Post by abstractbill »

tiffani wrote: post #12
emarcotte wrote: post #9

I'm in a very small company. I am the youngest employee. I'm not certain of the exact age difference, but I suspect I'm on the order of 25 years younger than the next youngest employee. This company was founded by people who all worked at another place and started their own show. They are all doing things they would never have dreamed of doing 3 years ago, let alone 10. There is blogging, talk of twitter, talk of fac…

Indeed, I'm the youngest person at this particular office and I dread going to group lunches and having to hear about husbands, kids, mortgage payments, and other stuff I just don't deal with at this point. The biggest thing for me is having to pretend...this false maturity is tiring. Definitely not a good sign, but yeah. At least, around folks your own age you can let loose a bit. On the other hand, having older fol…

Indeed, I'm the youngest person at this particular office and I dread going to group lunches and having to hear about husbands, kids, mortgage payments, and other stuff I just don't deal with at this point.

I remember thinking this, exactly!

And then I remember a few years later, having to pretend I was still interested in younger peoples' stories about drinking, clubbing, getting high and dating - when I really wasn't at all anymore. Strange - once I loved that stuff and couldn't imagine not loving it... and then it just got boring.

Still later (right now actually) my wife and I have made a big effort to branch out and maintain friendships with people everywhere from a decade younger to a decade older than us. I think it's been a pretty big positive change in our lives fwiw.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#17

Post by dkarl »

Activity streams? Like being on your dev group's build queue and CVS commit log email aliases?

Being easily bored and ready to work anywhere, anytime -- like every enthusiastic college student or young hobbyist programmer ever?

Sounds like not much is changing.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#19

Post by ynniv »

OliverSmith wrote: post #8
WillyF wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the reason that older people in management are slow to adopt new technology has little to do with their generations. It has more to do with the fact that their time is extremely valuable and they don't have a lot of it. Investing time in learning new technology just isn't worth it for them. I've seen plenty of older people who are unemployed adopting social media and other new technology. Their time isn't…

So when I go to management and let them know that I've spent my less valuable time and figured out a way to speed up our process, they should then either trust me and let me implement it, or spend the time and evaluate for themselves if I'm correct. When management says their time is too valuable to learn how to do their job more efficiently, they're just bad managers. It would be like a programmer entering a bunch o…

You might be wrong in thinking that your "faster" way is better. Given no details I can't really elaborate, but a fresh perspective often omits important subtleties that management values.

For instance: paper forms becoming web forms / database tables. Great for 99% of enterprise situations, but there is a loss of flexibility in edge cases. You can't write notes in the margins, or enter "invalid" but actually correct data.

Adoption will be seen differently by different people - those who have seen no edge cases (aka you) see the common case become substantially more efficient. Those who have more experience (aka management) might see the frailty of the new system and worry that important business will be lost.

So, people who value their time (doctors, lawyers, etc) still use older systems (often paper) that are more mature and flexible. Heck, I find myself (a "Millennial" early adopter) moving towards free text systems as I run into random inflexibility.

Re: The Generation Gap in Your Office

#20

Post by OliverSmith »

kscaldef wrote: post #15
OliverSmith wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just graduated from college and now working in a large company, this generation gap is extremely apparent. I understand that as a whole workplace technology is evolving, but it definitely takes a bit too long to catch on at larger companies with older people in management that don't understand the newer technology. The only way I can see to fix it (fast enough) is to start new companies and let the old…

Something that annoys me both about this article and your comment is this idea that there's something unique about the current generational dynamic. Do you really think that every new college graduate hasn't said the same thing you're saying now? This isn't about "millenials" and "boomers", it's about young (excited, ambitious, energetic, inexperienced, immature, naive) people and old (experienced, accomplished, resp…

Perhaps the actual problem is that there are a lot of people from older generations that were promoted to higher positions than they should have been and now they get to start making decisions. They're bad managers, but because they're in charge, nothing gets done to fix the problem. This probably ends up creating an illusion of a generation gap, when in reality the bad managers are usually older people that were promoted on seniority alone.

Either way, it's extremely frustrating to deal with bad managers no matter what generation you're from...

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