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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

"“The world isn’t really on an annual cycle anymore,” GE head of human resources Susan Peters said at the time, explaining that millennial workers in particular wanted faster, more frequent, mobile-enabled feedback."

Literally nobody, not even a millennial, has said they want mobile-enabled feedback on their job performance.

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The only feedback I really care about is my compensation package and a tactful way to say "money me, money now. Me a money needing a lot now" is to initiate a discussion on job performance. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that millennials are doing this more than older generations. Whenever someone has expressed some form of "work hard, keep your head down and wait" strategy to salary increase to me it's been an older person.

This quote makes me picture the Black Mirror episode: Nosedive. I hope this is not the future of employee feedback.

What I have expressed is that any system I must use at work (HR, expense reporting, JIRA/Teamcity) should be usable on mobile. But the state of the art in many areas is applications that are barely usable on desktop: Workday's app was Flex for a long time, and is now HTML5, but either way the recommendation is still "just keep reloading until it doesn't hang".

We had a perf review system that seemed to have build a buggy PDF editor with a browser native plugin (flash maybe? long ago) that was impossible to use except on an old version of IE on Windows, and most of us had Macs: what you wrote would scroll off the page in one direction and scrolling was one-direction-only with no scrolling back. It was absurd.

So my guess is that Susan Peters is poorly summarizing the idea that millennials have higher standards for the apps they have to use (which I find intuitive at first glance), and 'on mobile' is a proxy for that desire, mangled by a game of telephone.

It doesn't say that millennial workers want mobile feedback about their performance. This is millennial-aged managers or other team members wanting to instantaneously issue feedback about others. This is AmericanIdol's voting system manifest in the workplace. The most socially-connected worker wins. That's what millennials seem to want.

So when has being socially connected/disconnected in a company hasn't benefited / or hurt an employee ?

It's a fashion, a management style. It isn't logical. They want to work as they socialize. Constantly and publicly voting for people/things you like or of which you approve is normal. It's what highschool kids do these days. So it is completely natural for them to bring that scheme into the workplace.

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