Stop assuming that these people are competent. I've been in the c-suite meetings where these things are decided and it boils down to "In my day the office was good enough for me, so it will be good enough for everyone else too".
One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave
You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.
Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.
In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.
Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general...
In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation.
You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.
Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.
On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years.
Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.
I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds.
SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.
That only barely worked when corporations were a little bit loyal to employees. There's not one of those left now.
But youngers doesn't care, and I have the impression they actually fear being for too long, say more than 5 years, in the same place. They value the novelty of knowing new people and ways to get stuff done.
Their view was way less favorable and more comprehensive than mine, and they’ve seen more of them and from bigger companies than I have. They talked about them like they’re toddlers.
Human psychology is wild, when employees do something unusual, it is always presumed that it’s because they are stupid or lazy
When executives do something unusual, it’s rarely assumed that they’ve lost touch with reality and factory floor. Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity
Somewhat because people don't want to know that the people who lead them are idiots. They'll go so far as to bury their heads in the sand to not hear it.
But excel models of operating costs have stronger staying power than CEO fads, at least from my experience.