Hacker News Reader

Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

My brother calls return-to-office policies "panicking, in Boomer."

Tech company profits are declining. Management (especially Boomer management) needs to be seen as "doing something" or they're the ones on the chopping block. So they force everybody back into the office so they can be seen to be managing.

God forbid the cause of declining profits be things like national monetary policy or years of short-term decision-making that propped profits up to unsustainable highs.

No. It must be that Andy works from home. Better bring everybody in to keep an eye on them (to read their faces and find out for sure just how much shit they'll take from you before they quit).

View on HN

I doubt there are that many Boomers left in tech management - almost all that age cohort are in retirement or semi-retired, they're enjoying their Saga cruises and golf courses (or if they're unlucky, their Walmart greeter jobs).

I suspect there are managers panicking about losing relevance in a post-office world, but those will be middle-managers, not CEOs. Much of the panic is from owners of commercial real estate and their flying monkeys in the media who are seeing empty office blocks and declining property values and rents.

As for Musk, who knows. He's in his own very weird bubble of long-terminism or cosmism or whatever it is he believes in. Maybe he thinks if everyone works from home it will lead to a drop in birth rates or decline in Western society or something.

I'm specifically talking about the middle managers. They're the ones who need to be seen "doing things," so when it's time to surface any ideas for how to fix the problem, especially when it's their butts on the line, this is what comes out.

But I also refer to the boards and investors. We'd love to think it's all a young person's VC game, but behind all that money is still, more often than not, someone who panics in Boomer.

Baby Boomer generation is 1946-1964, which would make them 59-77. I expect only the younger range is likely to still be middle managers.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like the use of "boomer" as a derogative to be reductionist and ageist, not to mention most of the time incorrect, as I've seen it applied all the way to Millennials.

They've been criticizing my generation for receiving the "participation trophies" they gave us as kids, as well as screwing over our entire economy with shortsighted self-protectionism, so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age.

To be fair, I criticize them for the shit they did when they were my age too, so I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age.

> They've been criticizing my generation for receiving the "participation trophies" they gave us as kids

Are you sure that the people doing the criticizing are the same people giving out the trophies?

> so I definitely mean it in a derogatory way against people their age

The way you had used it, as commentary on middle managers, seem to include people from Baby Boomers all the way to Millennials.

> I'm criticizing them as a cohort, not because of their current age

In which case it sounds like using the age identifier would be incorrect.

Yes, 100%, Boomers are the parent generation of Millennials. They spent our whole childhoods giving us participation trophies, and our whole young adulthood criticizing us for having received them.

I criticize them as a generational cohort for being the most entitled, wasteful, short-sighted generation that has ever lived, and has done more to screw up the entire world they are handing on to their children than anyone in history.

They have done this at every stage of their lives, but especially once they were old enough to be having children.

> Yes, 100%, Boomers are the parent generation of Millennials. They spent our whole childhoods giving us participation trophies, and our whole young adulthood criticizing us for having received them.

I don't mean as a cohort, I mean as individuals. I have my doubts that the exact same person who has given out participation trophies is the one who criticized. I think you are mixing two separate groups into one, by using their birth years as a commonality.

Also, I suspect that participation trophies is a Western creation, perhaps even an American phenomenon, and the Boomers who are not part of those cultures did not participate in those actitivities.

Most middle managers I know are in their thirties and forties. So Millennial or maybe Gen-X but definitely not "Boomer".

To quote the Princess Bride, "you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means".

I'd say this of low- or first-level managers, but not the middle layers.

Those are filled with people who are clinging to their roles well past their usefulness, because even though they're ruining social supports like Medicare and Social Security by pulling out multiples more funds than they ever contributed, they also failed to save anything of their own or are otherwise refusing to retire and leave the workforce (even though they've already started receiving "retirement" benefits).

> they're ruining social supports like Medicare and Social Security by pulling out multiples more funds than they ever contributed

FYI, people don't get to "pull out" funds from social security. You get paid what the government computes you'll get.

> they also failed to save anything of their own or are otherwise refusing to retire and leave the workforce

So which is it? They failed to save therefore they can't retire, or they could retire but are "refusing to"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com