Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillyF | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com