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Gen Y Workers Reinventing IT for the Better
buzzardsbay writes "We all know the complaints about young employees. They depend too much on their parents' money, they need constant hand-holding, they have no job loyalty, they demand more than they're worth, they disrespect older employees, and they're naive about corporate culture. But despite this conventional wisdom, there's growing evidence that the different working styles of Gen Y workers might be causing fundamental — and beneficial — changes in the way enterprises run, especially when it comes to IT. For example, they may show better judgment when making tech purchases and are often better with green IT initiatives. This is a nice counterpoint to a previous story (and resulting incendiary comments) that dubbed young tech workers a risk to corporate networks."
Is it any wonder, with tens of thousands of layoffs every couple of years, why workers don't feel a strict loyalty to the companies that employ them? If the company isn't willing to maintain their educated, trained, experienced workforce through a minor downturn, then they should expect the employees to look for better opportunities.
Company loyalty does not exist with respect to a company's 'loyalty' to an employee.
As an employee, my loyalty extends only to the next paycheck, and no further.
Want to assure my loyalty, treat me like a person, not a 'resource'.
Give me what I need to do my Job, and listen to how I could possibly do my job better.
Give me training, don't let the value of my skills decline.
Give me a mentor, don't just sit me at a cube and expect to learn EVERYTHING myself.
Many companies think they can just bully young employees into working long hours, for crappy pay, nope, not me. But then again, I'm in engineering, and NOT IT, so it's a bit different.
No job loyalty? Well, my employer will ditch me whenever it's convenient for them, so why shouldn't I treat them the same? My older co-workers do the same. This is a fact of the modern workplace and is generation neutral.
Demand more than we're worth? Ok... Well if I have a job offer for 20% more elsewhere, I'm worth 20% more... It's not my problem that you have "no budget for raises" three consecutive years. My value increased over those years even if your shitty business model didn't. Now if you want to tell me that I demand more than I'm worth to you, then we'll talk... Or if you want to revisit the loyalty issue, maybe I'll be willing to cut you some salary slack... Either way, I also don't think this is a generational issue since many of my older co-workers are significantly overpaid for their contribution level without even needing to ask. This leads into the third point.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves. The ones that a right all the time because of what their resume says, and not due to any critical thinking, and who contribute zero to an effort beyond their experience can go suck a nut. I can put an older co-worker into one of these buckets within a few technical conversations. If somebody disagrees with me on a technical issue and tells me why with a reasoned explanation, they go in the "earned my respect, and a mental note to learn as much from them as possible". If the same situation arises and the more senior co-worker explains that their right by quoting their resume to me they go in the "probably full of shit 90% of the time" bucket.
It is the same old story, retold generation after generation. I wonder how much of this cycle is a part of natural life, and how much of it comes from ignorance? After all, you'd think people would clue in that when they were young they heard the same kinds of things they are now telling a new generation of young folks. This at least seems to be a tangible way to lesser the effects of such nonsense; because the young won't so strongly revile older generations without their antecedents being so intolerable to the change their own seeds have sown.
While change may be harder to accept the older you get, is it possible that this concept too is being challenged? It is one thing to be a farmer or an industrial worker all your life -- surely being intolerant of change is almost inevitable here. Yet, in such a dynamic economy, with jobs changing constantly, and information accessibility just beginning to reach extraordinary heights -- is it possible that tolerance of change will be ingrained in the coming generation? Imagine the kind of changes that would likely mean for society as a whole!
I spent 10 years working for large financial companies. Everyone I knew outside work thought I had the most stable job, while a few times I was very close to being part of large layoffs. It was very hard to advance because of competition and politics with coworkers.
Now I work for a small company where I'm valued on a more personal level. As the company grows so does my position within the company. There's no room for politics. I'm not saying I'm completely loyal and will never leave, but my job is stable and generally more enjoyable. My family is no longer impressed, but they don't understand that I'm actually better off.
Developers: We can use your help.
You're a bit off on your generations, or rather those in the workforce. Even if all they needed was a HS diploma, they'd still need to be born in 1989. If they did have access to a computer at a young age, it had a floppy; USB didn't become popular until at least 98, and wasn't common until 2002 or so. I also bet they didn't get broadband until 2000+.
The point still remains that my brother has a far different experience with computers than I did, being younger. He's almost always had the internet and doesn't know the pain of a router with a 56k modem. All the same I know how to use a computer much better than he does, even when i was his age. He shows little to no interest in them, and that might make a certain age group have a sweet spot - They grew up comfortable with technological change (not any particular one, but fundamentally), but were still young enough to know a few of the inner workings of computers, back when you had to fool around for an hour or so to get a game to install or a driver to work, back when everything had different ports, and plugging something in meant rebooting, installing, rebooting... when it was cheaper to build your own computer, or when if something went wrong you couldn't just scrap the computer.
Some aspects of computing might be lost to those not computer science majors because we've done such a good job, just like much of our generation as a whole doesn't have a clue how to do carpentry, fix a car, or do basic home repair - these things are supposed to work, and when they don't you call someone else in to fix them.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
I've been to parties in years past with young derivatives traders oh-so-impressed that they were of the generation that had removed all risk from our financial markets. Surely kids who have gotten tech degrees and jobs, but basically find tech boring and so mostly want the thrill (and money!) of a fast track to upper management can make the rest of our industries just as brilliant as it's turned out the financial sector is. Oh yeah. Let's bet the economy of the 2010's on this batch of clowns.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
What's with the fuss? Every generation is like this.
The previous one thinks they're feckless and idle, the new one thinks they're god's gift. The previous one had radical and new ideas in their day, the new one has radical and new ideas of their own. So all this stuff about "different cos they grew up with technology" is nothing new. Every generation "grew up with technology" of their time, they're nothing special.
My bet is that in 30 years time we'll still be reading stuff about the latest generation "growing up with technology" and how this is overhauling the preconceptions of previous generations, whose own "growing up with technology" is apparently no longer good enough.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves.
One common arrogance of youth is to presume one knows enough to adequately judge the qualities of the old. I'm not really old yet, but I've learned as I've left youth behind is that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did, and that I didn't even recognize that I needed to learn much of what I've learned. In fact you should respect older co-workers, not give them a blank check of course, but respect them. You don't know what wisdom they may have.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I've noticed that the `new' (eh!) generation is a bit shallow in their skills or curiosity. Most can quickly pickup front end things, but for most `hard' stuff, they expect an existing library to be present.
Hypothetical example: most new developers can quickly setup a streaming video from their website, but have little or no idea how TCP/IP nor video decoding actually works. Yes, I know it's sort of a pointless thing to know when you don't "need" to know it, just saying that the previous generation seemed to have been a bit more curious about things, even if they didn't "need" to know them.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Here's a nice example of why the current generation has no loyalty to its employers.
I work in the same place my father did. He's been working at the same company for 25 years. When he got there there was a clear expectation that it was a place where you could develop a carreer, and the company made efforts to retain employees. Good maternal/paternal leave, extended health benefits, country club, child care, discounts for many vacation places, gifts for employees' children for Christmas (I recall they were amazing gifts; I got a chemistry set and a bicycle on two of those years), a baby shower gift package for newborns with towels, diapers and food.
20 years later, and all of that has completely vanished. One generation later and none of that is to be seen, and I doubt if there's some corporation today that has such an extensive benefits package on what once were excellent benefits but were considered within the norm.And the thing is, some of those benefits didn't add up to that much monetarily, but they did at least give the impression that the company took extra steps to take care of you.
So, tell me again, why do these people deserve my loyalty now when it is clear that I could be laid off any minute without them looking back?
First of all, you certainly seem to be in the minority, judging from the figures I've seen over the past few years.
Second of all, I have to ask what you consider your "fair share", because if it's more than 300x what I made that year, I can tell you for certain it's not "fair".
Third, unless you're running a very small company (which is, of course, entirely possible), you are not personally responsible for procuring 100% of the business.
Now, don't get me wrong: unlike many slashdotters, I believe that someone with really good management skills can make a *huge* difference to a company or whatever fraction thereof he is given charge of. But you can't pretend that executive compensation in America, in general, is anything short of insane right now. Executives get brought in, proceed to take the company boldly into completely the wrong direction, lose it billions of dollars, and are sent packing with a "golden parachute" worth more money than my gross income combined over my entire lifespan.
You may very well be different. And, in all honesty, that might be the exception, and not the rule: I haven't done exhaustive research to come up with statistics on it. But I do know that the average executive salary is more than the average worker's salary by a greater percentage than (I believe) it ever has been in the past—including during the Gilded Age before there were any labour laws.
Don't even try to claim that this is the way it should be.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I'm an old fart who's been in this industry for a quarter century. About a year ago I started working at a company with a lot of young'uns just a few years out of school. I have never worked with a smarter, more creative group of people in my career. Sure, they don't feel much job loyalty, but who can blame them, given corporate behavior in recent years. These people are hard-working and dedicated, and they give me hope for the future.
No sig? Sigh...
if god forbid you have a chronic or congenital condition - heart murmur, asthma, family history of anything at all, severe allergy to something or other.
Really. From experience: private health insurance isn't worth the paper it's written on, and your rates will screw you if there is anything that they can call a risk... or worse yet, you get "coverage" and then they claim that everything under the sun is "related to a pre-existing condition" and force you to go into court to try to get them to pay, knowing they can run the clock for fucking years before having to present you with your check and hoping that you'll give up after the umpteenth appeal their army of shysters^H^H^H^H^H demonic assholes^H^H^H^H^H^H lawyers file.
Shop around for doctors like you do anything else
It's the emergency stuff I most worry about. There's nothing worse than sitting in the emergency room and being told by the nurse that you have to talk to the insurance company's lawyer to get approval while you're coughing blood. And when it's an emergency, "shop around" doesn't apply.
That and the fact that you can't "shop around" for insurance. Every time you apply for insurance and get rejected, they stick it in the file and it's a black mark against you for future applications because the other companies go "hey, company X rejected, let's find out why using triplicate forms and make sure it takes longer than they're willing to spend time on to even apply for ours."