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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

When I started as a software engineer in the Aerospace industry, I was the "kid", one of the few young guys working amongst a large group of middle age (and up) engineers. Interestingly, there wasn't much in the way of mentorship -- just dump all of the grunt work on the kid. "It's good for you to cut your teeth on testing/maintenance/etc." And also "You need to pay your dues, son." - whenever I asked for more responsibility / new projects, etc.

Now that I'm middle-aged (39), I'm one of the few older guys working amongst a large number of younger folks. Formal mentorship and leadership development programs (so you can be promoted past the Gen Xers we're currently targeting for layoffs) are real things now focused solely on the younger generation...

Any other Gen Xers feeling cheated?

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> Any other Gen Xers feeling cheated?

I’m unlikely to be called Gen X, but my attitude has always been the same: it’s our duty to make the lives of future generations better than ours. Raise our children better than we were raised. Provide our juniors the opportunities and resources we didn’t have.

So, I don’t feel cheated. I feel happy because my efforts are helping future generations.

Similar experience for me and we are the same age. I don’t feel cheated per say but I agree we had less opportunity available to us and less ability to affect change.

The thing to remember is that we are a small generation sandwiched between two big ones (baby boomers and millenials). We never got to move the needle as much culturally as these two generations did.

The boomers set the rules, which we begrudgingly followed. And the millenials are breaking the rules and we have to roll with that too.

Sometimes it feels like we are caught between both worlds, and forced to choose a side where we only agree with them 50% of the time.

Aren't those of us born in 1980 (+/- a year or so) millennials?

I'm about the same age (38) and I guess I count myself as a millennial. I'm certainly considered a millennial by everyone older than me. I'd always heard the cutoff between Gen X and millennial was 1975, but now that I search I'm seeing '82 or '83 a lot. That doesn't fit with how I typically see the term used, though.

That having been said, I feel like there were plenty of mentorship programs when I was first starting my career, but I haven't worked for too many pure software companies. It may have been very different in actual tech companies. The more traditional corporations I've worked in tend to be big on formal mentorship programs.

Millennials were born early 80s to late 90s. The exact years depend on who you ask and are a bit fiddly anyway depending on how you interpret the phrase "was a teenager during the 'new millennium' (decade).". (For example, does pre-teen count, did the millennium start in 2000 or 2001, etc)

> Now that I'm middle-aged (39)

Excuuuuuuuuse me?!

How would you define middle-age? 39 is roughly half of the current US life expectancy for a human male (~78).

Barring a cure for aging coming along within the next few decades, I'm right about in the middle of my lifepsan.

Middle age is usually considered as the years from about 45 to 65

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