GenZ software engineers, according to older colleagues
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware.
The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries.
Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.
Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.
When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist...
But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me.
I looked directly into the trap after it was opened.
Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it!
As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.
I really don’t believe this is possible, but maybe others can hide it better.
> People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one
Agree on loyalty. But that’s different from holding a limited view of engagement.
Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.
There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.
Could've ended that sentence there and it would better reflect 99% of organisations, while also explaining part of the attitude you're referring to.
Please correct me if I misunderstood you.
Loyalty shouldn't be freely given. But it's not particularly hard to spot the overly transactional types, and it also shouldn't surprise anyone that while those tactics work for a while, they cliff out before leadership. Again, that cliff is well within the range of a really good salary. But it's a cliff nonetheless.
Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".
Most people will self-develop anyway, and at some point you'll need somebody to fill that leadership position anyway.
So this is not a problem.
Things change constantly, such is life, we'll get used to it.
Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier. You could get some stable job and coast and do fine in the economy 20-30 years ago. I think your sympathies for the way us gens X/Y approached jobs 10 years ago is misdirected (though I suspect a lot of Millenials, especially those such as myself who aren't highly compensated, are taking a more individualistic approach to their careers now as well)
Gen Z is out here trying to survive and they've gotten an incredibly raw deal, I'd sympathize with them instead.
I'm curious what years you think this applies to.
Millenials definitely didn't have it as easy, most were in their first years of career (1-5 years) when 2008 happened.
Not sure what sort of rose tinted glasses you have about the 00s but they were a lot worse than today.
I think this is the first time I get to be like, "kids today don't know how hard we had it", so that's a neat experience I suppose. What I won't say is that I think they've got it any easier; indeed it seems like every generation since X has gotten a worse deal.
Gen X especially had some really amazing opportunities, but income to purchasing power has been more favourable for pretty much the entire time Gen X was coming of age.
Personally, I'm just thinking about what entry-level salaries were 15 years ago compared to the cost of real estate, and I could see a clear path to homeownership for a lot of people entering the workforce at that time, even outside of the top 10% paying jobs
Gen Z unfortunately doesn't really have a practical path to homeownership (in big western cities anyway) outside of A) inheritance/family support, or B) entering the workforce into a position that would put them in the top 3-5% of their cohort
All I remember is a constant fear of cancer, AIDS, and massive unemployment.
But off course no, it's because our grandparents were more loyal to their companies.
The new deal was all about giving people work, not free stuff.
In my own life I have seen the enormous, overwhelming, and abundantly clear difference from when I self-commiserated, lamenting my own misfortune to embracing hardship, explicitly forbidding myself from whining, throwing myself into hard work, foregoing any kind of social life for a few years and eventually it all paid off, only getting better when I decided to be an entrepreneur.
But all my effort is nothing compared to the hard work my dad had to do, and even less compared to that of my grandfather's.
Naturally this reflects onto businesses, which of course are made and run by people. Loyalty to employees and vice versa is gone in favour of getting the better deal.
I disagree, loyalty in friendship or with your family is not worth less. Being loyal to human being is not stupid, for me it's being loyal to a company or a brand that is.
When being loyal to your close ones, you create trust and for me this is critical of my hapiness.
I don't get anything from being loyal to a company.
edit: typo
Software developer compensation spans a very wide range, especially in the USA. Devs with the same years of experience could be earning anywhere from $50k on the low end to $500k on the high end in the same city. The "upward mobility" across the range is relatively easy and not hindered by your credentials (i.e. you aren't permanently barred from the highest end jobs because you didn't do your undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton).
The fact that the USA allows immigration means that this compensation range applies globally. A dev in Tallinn earning €80k can aspire for the $500k role in San Francisco and actually have a decent shot of getting it.
It's almost unreasonable to expect employees to remain loyal in this situation.
The phenomenon where people stayed in the same job forever happened because they couldn't really go anywhere else to make more. Indeed, at high-paying tech companies, you will find many devs who have been there for decades.
Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
I often have to explain to them why the thing that they saw working for 2 seconds in that tiktok clip will likely not work unattended for their full day exhibition weekend.
But those are some people from that generation, there are just as many that just want to learn and don't want to take shortcuts.
I agree however that overestimating your own abilities is a generic trait of you g people regardless of generation — but that is how they learn — how we all learned.
In general people protest when they can't just change things on their own terms. Arguably older generations have less of the issue (but really, they like to yell at the clouds like everyone else IMHO)
> not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
Someone with enough experience will be better at masking these traits and not have their process violations or risk taking surface too much.
Either it's completely transparent to everyone and people don't even acknowledge it as process violations (e.g. the more experienced worker just happens to have higher permissions and can officially do whatever they want. Staying 3 or 4 years at a place will give you an amount of permissions that wouldn't make sense on paper for your role) or they know how to stay under the radar.
> As many before me have said, they have cast off outdated expectations of ‘loyalty’ to jobs that aren't loyal to them, in return. It's admirable for the most part, though I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.”
> – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US)
That's been the de facto for a while and now it's just gone. Second part is wild
This is the exact opposite of what I've found, and what other older engineers and engineering managers I personally know have found.
In genreal we find GenZ to be overly sensitive to technical critisism, and unwilling to speak bluntly about technical ramifications.
This point alone makes me doubt the entire article...
We've become jaded growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in - in my home country we have massive cost of living increases, ever-nascent climate change, housing shortages and income inequality, aging population combined with policy changes that make life better for the boomer generation.
Many of my peers have given up hope that they will ever be able to buy their own home. We're stressed, lonely, and are a generation of test subjects to big-tech's addiction machines.
Working in tech has it's benefits and I am lucky to not be faced with many of these issues personally, but I know plenty of people my age and younger that have gone past the stage of "terrified for the world their kids will grow up in" and into a numb subsistence.
They will resent you for whatever you did or didn't, and you will judge them for not understanding or (not) doing XYZ.
FWIW the zoomers I work with seem, apart from the fact that they watch tiktok, basically identical to how I remember being new in the field.
Ironic that this article feels I'm the one who needs warning
In my country generations didn't even have a name until recently when 15-20 yo started talking about millenials, Z and boomers, where boomers are anybody about the age of their parents and more. Technically most of those parents are generation X, some even Y. I learned it by reading the article now.
Furthermore and more importantly different social and economic dynamics mean that people of the supposed same generation are different, especially when generations span only a few years. They watch the same videos but the world around them could be significantly different. A generation in one part of the world could be more similar to the previous or the next one somewhere else.
Anyway, probably all results still hold true if we think about evaluating the differences between people that entered the job market recently and colleagues that have been working for 10 or 20 years.
I find the Gen-XYZ thing to be mostly american culture war.
And sadly I think this is just another tool in their culture to create division, and of course conquer as consequence.
According to Wikipedia [1] "The contemporary characterization of these cohorts used in media and advertising borrows, in part, from the Strauss–Howe generational theory" but the chart over there despite being captioned as "Timeline of generations in the Western world" seems to be very USA specific given the definitions in the text that follows it.
I don't know, the rare times in which I hear someone use derived terms like "boomer", they get weird looks like they are some sort of imbecile. This kind of division does not get much traction in Europe, I guess.
"[...] I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.”
– Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US)
Due to inflation and other factors, cost of living is increasing anyway, so either way you should give out some form of raise every year (at the very least).
As another millennial... GenZ'ers just got this right. I had to live through this and understand it, but it seems to be natural to them, somehow?
They just got this right, and most people can (should?) only learn.
I ask, because this opinion is something you'd often hear from marketing people or the manegerial type — people that are eye-wateringly naive when it comes to tech.