Comment by kenamarit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenamarit | Hacker News Reader

"They expect to be listened to when they have an idea, even when they’re the youngest person in the room."

Speaking as a gen-y-er, I completely agree with this sentiment. From my experience working in offices, there are always two conflicting thoughts I consider when speaking up, however:

1. The established politics of the office and who you are "allowed" to speak to and what you're allowed to say, and

2. The reality of the actual task/goal you are trying to accomplish.

Even if your ideas are good and beneficial to the work at hand, sometimes #1 is more important than #2. If this is true then I will quit as soon as I am able.

It's generally true that I consider my elders peers, not authority figures, as the article states. This does not mean I don't have a lot to learn from them! In fact, I want to learn, teach me, guide me!

However, like anyone and everyone you run into in life, an elder in the workplace has to earn my trust and respect, they need to prove to me that they are worth learning from. Just because you are older than me does not mean your ideas are worth listening to. Sometimes having a higher rank does correlate to being someone worth listening to. Just as often I have found this to be not true.

There's a great scene in Band of Brothers, where a veteran non-com is showing the young privates about to do a combat jump to hold onto their rifles instead of attaching them to their gear. "be ready to fight when you land or die" is what he tells them. The non-com gained that experience first hand after his first own jump and his rifle was lost in the prop wash.

I wonder how a Gen-Y would have reacted to that...

The article doesn't suggest that Generation Y won't listen to good ideas that come from the experienced. Rather, it says that they expect all ideas to be considered based on their merits, not their source.

There's also plenty of young people who expect everyone to listen to them because of their vast entitlement complex, not necessarily out of some meritocratic ideal. I've had 10 year olds give me dirty looks because I didn't entertain their idea of what we should do at my kid's birthday party and I've had 25 year olds with the same look on their face at work.

I offered lots of opinions in my early 20s. People took them seriously because I was right. One of the things that goes unmentioned is that the latest generation of hires is really smart. Competition at every level of the "educational culling process" has just skyrocketed, and companies have focused more heavily on criteria like school pedigree, etc; at least in professional jobs. Coupled with the low employment rate, the latest generation of hires is statistically likely to have the highest SAT score and GPA's of anyone in the company. Now standardized test scores are correlated with some measures of intelligence, and companies evidently seem to think grades matter otherwise they wouldn't take them so seriously in the hiring process. Bottom line, the common refrain of "I couldn't have gotten hired at my company today" is as a result of increasing competition for schooling and jobs very true.

I find that age only has an indirect effect on respect. People who get respect usually have it pretty quickly when you meet them and are able to retain it through their actions. They don't have to ask people to respect them. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with age, but it is somewhat based on a track record and the confidence that experience brings. A young person usually has no track record yet, but they may be very charismatic or inventive or have other respectable qualities. The respect will come, but It has to happen naturally for us all.

People who talk about getting respect usually don't have any real respect, although they may get lip service from everyone if they're in a position of authority.

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