The Generation Gap in Your Office | Hacker News Reader

The Generation Gap in Your Office

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44 pointsjaybol31 comments

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. Workplaces aren't going to adopt new technology because of the attitude of "millennials," they're going to adopt it because it enables more productivity (or because they took on a stupid contract with a terrible provider).

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 older ones fail.

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 that valuable, so they make the effort to learn the new stuff. They're same generation as the folks in management, but the value proposition of investing time in learning technology is very different.

But the time required to learn a new technology, at least enough to use it successfully, is much lower for "millenials." And it's scary low for the kids in middle school now, who learned how to spell from animated computer programs and could probably click a mouse before they could write. I think your point is valid, that the older management don't have the time, but I'd say because of the difference in time it takes to learn, younger management would be able to make the time for a new system.

This generation gap is apparent to me, and it's all the more frustrating as I consider myself an outlier in it. I'm young (firmly in the middle of the millenials by this definition), but I identify more with the values and communication styles of the older generation. I love the technology behind it, but I don't use it. This leaves me with the prospect of looking like a horrible anachronism when myself and my peers are in the positions of power.

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 of data by hand over and over again because it might take too long to figure out how to automate it. It may not pay off immediately, but it will in the long run.

It seems to be a misconception of older people that a manager's time is too valuable to learn new things. I don't know why that is... it just always seems that way to me. Maybe you can enlighten me...

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.

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.

exactly... inflexibility to change an old process because of 1% or less of the use cases could be justified or not. If a new process makes 99% of things take 10% of the time and 1% of things take 1000% of the time, you still win. I would argue that edge cases should rarely be a reason to hold up improving a process.

...except that those 1% might be incredibly critical to the business. Perhaps if you break them, the fallout will be bad enough to kill the company.

Whether or not you should try a new process is entirely a function of what kind of company you're in, not what generation the various players grew up in. If you're in a startup, you should definitely try any new process you can think of that might give you an edge. If the company is basically milking a cash-cow, be incredibly risk-averse when thinking about "making things better".

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.

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...

I think this applies more to larger companies than startups. Because startups are small they are also nimble and can change faster, whereas large companies can't adapt fast enough to keep up with the pace of change and so a gap occurs.

Can I ask what startup?

Yes, you can. Actually, I won't wait for you to ask. It's called One Day, One Job and the URL is in my profile.

I couldn't agree more. I thought this article read like a horoscope.

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 facebook... social media is one of the new favorite words of the president.

I don't think the generation gap really drives the technology change. Sure, young people may be able to change faster, but old people can still get it when it makes sense to.

That said, I wish there were some younger people around... it's hard to relate to their discussions about kids, houses, etc...

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.

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.

...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.

Do you think those things got boring as a result of doing them too much? i.e. do you subscribe to the idea that you can "get it out of your system" while you're young? Or do you think it's more a result of age? Once your friends start getting married, you feel the need to settle down too?

I'm asking because this subject has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm 25 and don't really feel like I've "gotten it out of my system. On the other hand, I feel like I've kind of started down the "settling down" road in such a way that I can't really be 21 again. Any thoughts or words of wisdom?

I can definitely relate to this sentiment. I started working in an office environment at 18, and have been moving up in position exponentially since then. At 22 I'm now in a position where I'm senior (in that I am a developer, and the people "below" me are junior developers) to a few developers. The first 2 companies I worked at were large enterprises (50k+ employees) where i'm sure I was either one of or the youngest working there. Age become a particularly complex issue when I was 19, and working in a lab. Often I would experience age harassment from a QA lead (who was later fired...) Things got a lot easier after I turned 21 though. Still I find it easier to get work done If I ignore the subject of age as much as possible... unless one of my coworkers has discovered my HN username, I do not believe anyone other than HR knows my age at my current company.

From their graph, looks like Gen X got screwed even as to the number of years their generation covers. Boomers and Millenials are both allotted 19 years, while Gen X only gets 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.

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.

People like that making up nearly half the office would be a significant change. What you describe is highly useful and productive, but also a small minority.

The (probably false) assumption there is that the oldest millennials will still feel the same when the youngest start working and they've got 15-20 years of work experience.

There's also an assumption, again probably false, that typical individual millennials actually embody the new trends associated with their generation. Just as the hippie generation didn't have very many hippies, the millennial generation probably doesn't have many individuals like the hyper-networked, hyper-social individuals that serve as its poster children.

  EnterpriseAdoptionDate = EarlyAdoptionDate + 5 years //  that is all

[EDIT: Changed "OpenSourceAdoptionDate" to "EarlyAdoptionDate". Thanks, coderdude.]

Is that how they figure out when to buy new copies of Windows? The article doesn't mention open source software.

Ack! The green shade pie chart is almost impossible to read.

The article makes some good points but ignores one essential factor. As much as this "millennial" bored-again-generation will change the enterprise (the big corporations) these big corporations will change them even more. The author as a millennialist does not realize that those retiring boomers are really the "hippie" generation. They had no less revolutionary intentions when they infiltrated the enterprise in the late 70s. When the millennials will be retiring the enterprise will not be much different (they may have updated their current XP Professional set up though) but the revolutionary millennials will look not much different than today's retiring boomers.

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