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Young Employees Pose Increasing Risk to Networks
buzzardsbay writes "Baseline is reporting on an upcoming survey from Symantec and Applied Research-West that confirms many suspicions about the generation gap in the workplace, namely that younger workers will use your corporate network to run most any device, technology or social networking software they can get their hands on. Dubbed "Millenials," these workers born after 1980 are nearly twice as likely to use cell phones and PDAs at work, and half admit to installing unauthorized software on their employer's computers. On the upside, the Millenials are more security aware than their older co-workers."
They pose a greater risk because of unauthorized software, yet they are more security aware. Am I missing something that would otherwise make this sensical?
disclaimer: I am a "millenial", whatever the hell that means ;)
From the second slide: It's irritatingly true that many millenials can't pry themselves from their damn phones. Nobody should allow their phones to ring in class or during a date -- unless they're dope dealers, pimps, doctors, or on-call IT staff. That's why I prefer the company of mature women: they say a lot less, but what they say actually counts!
From the fourth slide: Not at all surprised to see that 59 % of "millenial" workers think they can install whatever they want, given that more of them are spoiled gimme-gimmes...but to be fair, I'll bet that older people are far more adept at trashing their home computers than millenials are at trashing any computer. How many times have you all had to reinstall your grandpappy's mangled, crapware-infested OS(which shall remain nameless...*wink*)?
From the tenth slide: how does better access to technology improve work/life balance? Does it enable workaholics to work from home during their offtime? Does it enable employees to feel "home" while fuckin' off on Myspace at work? I doubt that a significant percentage of those sampled were full-time telecommuters who truly felt a better work-life balance(read: they weren't "encouraged" to put in mass overtime just because they worked from home).
What exactly does "unauthorized software" mean?
My company doesn't give me administrator privilages, but has IE 5.5 installed. They haven't told me exactly what I can or can't do with my computer (except "you can browse the web in your down-time, but don't look at porn"), but I don't think the people that immediately oversee me know enough about computers to understand installing programs and stuff (really, it's pretty amazing--they don't even know that IE 5.5 is different at all from whatever they use at home).
The computer won't let my upgrade IE, so I installed Opera and Firefox. Is this "unauthorized software"?
Now, let's go a step more complicated.
They said I can browse the web in my downtime, right. So I figured I can also download and view MIT physics lectures (yes, Walter Lewin). My computer doesn't have proper codecs to view these videos. So I had to install codecs, but the computer is very resistant to that--it took a lot of trial and error to find a codec that would install and also play the videos.
Did the larger amount of work to avoid the problems associated with a lack of administrator privileges make this "unauthorized"?
I've also tweaked the registry (this is Windows 2000) because there were several programs starting with the computer that I have no use for. "Unauthorized"?
I'll remember this article next time that me, born in 1982 has to go round removing all the shareware games like Kyodai that all the middle age helpdesk women have decided to install on their computers because the 40 yr old manager we have thinks they should be free of security restrictions even if it causes such problems and creates security risks for the network.
Or when I'm dealing with silly amounts of calls because one 40+ yr old colleague is stood outside on their mobile phone arranging with their wife who is doing the cooking and the other is browsing holiday sites deciding where to go on holiday next.
Articles like this are stupid, they're a generalisation and where I work it couldn't be further from the truth. 3 out of 4 of our 1980s+ born workers and 1 out of 12 of our pre 1980s born workers make up our best 4 workers, that's completely out of line with the articles findings and whilst I realise you always get anomalies from statistical samples you should also not try and dress up this kind of bullshit as general fact.
In fact look at TFA, as hard as that is when it insists on jumping to the next stat before you've had chance to check the page properly I don't notice any information how solid a test base they used.
For all I know this could be put together by some disgruntled middle aged worker who actually sucks bad at his job but like many would rather blame someone else and so decided to blame the younger generation for taking his work.
Anyone know how reasonable a test base was used for this study? As it stands I could equally put together a made up study claiming older people are more likely to steal from the work place and pass it off as being fact.
Same old shit. "You are new, just accept your shitty pay and conditions and one day you will get the good job". I heard that before, and actually believed it for a few years. Then I saw the lack of progress me and all those around me were actually making. What you are saying is bullshit.
It isn't about greed, it is about respect and being paid your due. The amount you are paid for applying your knowledge has less to do with the quality of your knowledge than how long you have been with the company - and young people are rarely with a company for long because we are treated as disposable tools. In such an environment where what you produce is compensated for by a pittance just because you are young, there is no incentive to work hard. There is a significant incentive to run off half-arsed work, spend the rest of the time playing with your gadgets, and bullshit your supervisor with technical jargon - so after 4-5 years being bounced around the industry that is what I did. Doing so made me feel slightly better about my shit jobs, and made no difference to the rate at which I was turned over.
But like I said, I'm out now. I'm going into physics and hopefully a job where I can actually be respected for what I know.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Or an admin who has looked up the file and registry permissions required to run the shoddy software (shoddy, yes, but also provided by manufacturer and the only way to do business) and found that said software requires the admin to essentially open up the entire HKLM branch anyway, thus granting local admin privileges available in fact if not in name. Welcome to the wonderful world of car dealerships.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I'm not a 'milleniumial', I was born in the first half of the 20th century. When I work for a company, they want two things: productivity and security. Security means that I'm not going to harm the company physical property and co-workers. Productivity means that I produce more of what they sell than it costs them to pay me.
Two paracitical factors inhibit this arrangement: the IT department and the human resources (legal) department. The cousin ITs believe that they can build a framework according to their training that will make us all be more productive. The HR believe the same with a different framework. But since neither of them are engaged in the primary productive activity that makes the enterprise profitable, the inevitably screw it up. In a million little and not so little ways. So we fight back.
Case in point, in the USA the politicians and insurance companies have fucked-up the health care industry to the point where most employers will not hire people in order to avoid providing health insurance. They hire people on 'contracts' creating a class of permanent temporary workers. This is especially common in the electronics industry. We work some place for six months, then work another place for six months, etc... If we get sick, we point a gun at the head of some supermarket manager and have him give us the cash in the safe. It's the new American way, it will happen to you, so don't judge me for what I must do. I don't want to hurt anyone.
Anyway, we bring our own tools to new jobs. Our software programs that we customize and modify that will maximize our productivity. Tools like text editors, spreadsheet macros, graphics and CAD design programs. I'm going to spend forty hours learning CADbozoCAD when most of the industry uses BozoCAD, just because your company got it a 10% discount? Fuck that!
I'm going to put BozoCAD my computer that I work with. I'm going to create works and convert the results into standard formats. I'm going to ignore as much as possible any previous work done in any non-industry standard format. Is there a risk to your company network and even maybe the BSA Microsoft thugs? Possibly, but...I...don't...give...a...fuck. If you hire us and provide health insurance like all companies do in the rest of the civilized world, then I ( and the millions like me in this situation) would be more sensitive to these concerns. It's one of the unforseen issues that results from using perma-temps as your workforce.
Most production managers realize this and accept it. Most cousin ITs and dumb-as-shit Human Resources people don't. Because it doesn't fit into the frameworks that they built. But my paycheck depends on the companie's bottom line and as a production worker, I create that.
So it is a constant three-way battle between the cousin ITs (the information technology department of the company who maintain the company network),the perma-temps, and the HR lawyers. They ALWAYs believe that by firing us, they maintain control and security. But they don't provide the product that keeps the company in business. Their departments are not profit centers for the company.
So the game just goes around and around. This is why I have come to hate the IT department in any company. HR people are too stupid to be concerned with, and lawyers aren't human so don't waste emotional cycles on them.
sometimes one has to depend on others' passwords(with the other's consent, of course) to get stuff done
Oh no no no. I can't image a situation where someone else would have some legitimate business reason for knowing my password. Further more, I cannot imagine a situation where I'd want to know someone else's password. That's all I need, "Did ya hear? Bob got called in to the big boss's office this morning--something about 'questionable content' on one of the servers. Rumor is Bob claims someone else had access to his account."
I have some unauthorized software on my computer. Some I really can't do my job without--Oracle client and SQL-Plus. Some are just nice to have--EditPadPro, for example. (Corporate policy was obviously written for business users, not IT or IS.)
But passwords and access are entirely different story. If you don't have the credentials needed to do the job and someone is suggesting by-passing network security, it's time to suggest a meeting with that person, yourself, and that person's boss to get a clear understanding of why the situation requires a disregard for the company's security policy and all the common sense rules of network security.
Now if you don't have the required access because you didn't contact the system/application owner or follow whatever procedure is in place to request access, I suggest you bite the bullet and take the blame. I'm sure whatever consequences follow will not be as bad as if you get caught breaking into someone else's account. (An account on a company system belongs to the company. If anyone in your IT department has any sense, there's a policy against sharing accounts and passwords such that an individual employee is not at liberty to share account information. Just because someone gives you their password does not mean you are authorized by the company to use their account.)
he chose to blame insurance blah blah... but the fact of the matter is temp agencies ARE becoming massive massive employers for white collar jobs. the early temp agencies were for blue collar jobs, but now it's spread to white collar jobs and, yeah the company usually doesn't hire you because replacing you with another temp instead of hiring you is 'cheaper.'
I have heard of many many places that now use temp agencies almost exclusively. The reason why white collar jobs are going to temp agencies, is because they can staff the positions like lightning and have them ready to be restaffed when the people have been on contract too long, and you get a really good idea of where to put certain people because of the tests the temp agency runs... I know some of this stuff can be done with a normal HR department, but it boils down to cost, temp agencies get the worker to do the same job for less pay, even when the temp agency takes a certain cut of that pay.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
In other news:
"That's not our problem", says area CIO. "Our problem is educating our helpdesk, that if someone calls and says he's an employee and needs a new password for his account, they shouldn't just give out a password without further identification. "
Seen it happen in three companies in the last 5 years. Each company with more than 2000 employees & one of them a fortune-500 company.
You can attach boosters to anything. It just costs more. -
Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 07, @12:26PM
Yes, you were. The baby boomers. Us gen-X-ers watched them take over everything on the grounds that youth and social position should not be discriminated against, cement themselves so firmly into positions of power that nothing can dislodge them, and then kick away the ladders they found so useful on the grounds that age and achievement should not be discriminated against. You lot are the second generation they've shat on - they practised on us, and we were so stunned by the sight of our future being flushed down the toilet that we let them get really good at it. Sorry about that... on the other hand, you guys have at least grown up without the memory of hope.
I don't think it is fair to make such a broad generalization.
It depends on the person. I have had plenty of very technical people
in non technical positions. It is the halfway ones that give me a problem.
Someone that is savvy will already know how to gain
administrative rights on a Mac Laptop, and won't have to ask. The truly savvy ones
almost never call for support unless a piece of hardware has failed.
Tales from the trenches:
I was working desktop for an advertising agency around the time that p2p was
becoming VERY popular (edonkey, kazaa, etc). Each summer we would get a new
batch of college interns. You could bet on 2 things, the girls were cute, and the
boys would barely even pause to call their moms before installing their favorite
p2p platform.
At my next company we discovered a guy running around after 6 pm starting edonkey
on every computer in his department.
It wasn't long before hair trigger p2p client detection was installed.
music lover since 1969
I was going to comment on this thread, but you hit the nail on the head. I work for the "evil" fortune 500 large corporation. Same situation. We get a lot of resumes, a few look like they might be a match technically, and then even fewer have the personality to work in a corporate environment. We almost exclusively do try-to-buy contracts here for that reason, usually 6 mos to a year before someone will get hired on full-time. It's a two way street also, sometimes after 6 mos they want to run screaming from here. We've gotten to the point where we are usually willing to sacrifice technical expertise for personality. We can overcome just about any technical obstacle, however the rogue @ssh0le programmer that can't and won't work well with others is virus to the organization, especially considering it takes an act of congress to fire anyone anymore.
Maybe... just maybe... you have a point. But if so, the boomer generation should emphatically NOT be saying Gen X and Millenials are lazy self-entitled pansies. Instead Boomers should be saying - We're sorry, we collected more intergenerational economic rents than we should have, and kept doing it for too long. We are the arrogant and greedy generation. Now that we are "rich" on our children, grand children, and great-grand-children's backs, how can we transfer some of that wealth back to later generations and ease your transition into economic sustainability?