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Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology?
xTrashcat writes "I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname 'Google' because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information. Being 22, it is, I speculate, needless to say that I am the youngest of my coworkers. If there is a piece of software, hardware, a technique, etc., I want to know everything about it. On the contrary, nearly all of my coworkers resent it and refuse to even acknowledge it, let alone learn about it. For example, we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7. A few months later, we decide that a computer lab was going to get an XP image instead of Win7. After several days worth of attempts, none of our XP images, even our base, would work, and it left everyone scratching their heads. We were on the verge of returning thousands of dollars worth of machines because they were 'defective.' I was not satisfied. I wanted to know why they weren't working instead of just simply returning them, so I jumped into the project. After almost 30 seconds of fishing around in BIOS, I noticed that UEFI was enabled. Switched it to legacy, and boom; problem solved. My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes. So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
That will prove you are qualified.
I just hope it's deserved
I would say no, in general they aren't. However, I will say that you got lucky. Why they weren't looking into the bios from the get go is beyond me.
You sound 22.
Whatever, your work place is like, the answer is "No." Different workplaces are different. If your workplace is terrible and you can't make it work for you, leave. But be warned, your new place might be worse, maybe a lot worse.
So you learned the 80/20 rule and you happen to be in the minority. Your questions are all irrelevant. Word of advice - if you want to stay employed, stop showing off, because your bosses will probably be in the 80%.
When the older guys have kids and a family, spending all their energy on work can be hard. Older people should have experience, younger people should have drive. Working together, you can get amazing things done.
There are lots of people who do not perform well in their jobs, for various reasons. Age may be a red herring, as I've seen the behavior you describe in both old people and young people. (I was 19 when I started my career, so it is not "needless to say" that you are the youngest in your office. I am 34 now.)
I recommend that you not waste time psychoanalyzing your coworkers for underperforming. Instead, I recommend you take exploit your willingness to get to the bottom of things and simply earn a reputation for being the guy who can actually fix things. This will pay off in $$$, or should, if you handle it right. Alternatively, blaming your coworkers' failure to do this on age, or even fixating on that issue at all, is likely to earn you a reputation for being a cocky and arrogant young jerk that nobody wants to work with. Remember, I was 19. Don't do it. :)
If you have this level of attention to detail, one thing you might want to watch out for later on is a perfectionism that might cause you to obsess about investigating things even when there is no payoff. Watch out for letting yourself get trapped into jobs that don't have a payoff, whether that payoff be in monetary or in some other type of satisfaction. It's okay to work for a reward besides money; it's not okay to let yourself obsess and waste time that could be spent doing something you like better or that brings you better rewards.
A book I recommend for you is Leadership and Self-deception. The format is "business parable," which always comes off as silly and preachy, but the concepts in it are sound and useful as you discover and deal with mental blocks on the job, in others and also in yourself.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Where is the link to your facts?
Most people who are working in information technology are in IT because they genuinely love working with new things. And unfortunately, a significant minority get into IT because they think it's an easy way to make good money. It sounds like you have the misfortune of working with an entire office full of the latter type of people. Get out before their inflexible attitudes infect you.
I am 37 years of age. I, evidently (and spuriously) enjoy the usage of too much extraneous, needless, and unnecessary punctuation; however, I'd like to relate a little story to you.
My co-worker, not much older than you, has absolutely no idea how to use the command line. He doesn't know what Perl is, or Bash. To his credit, he can write a little SQL, but we worked together on something recently that took us an hour to fix after he'd banged his head against it for a couple of days. It's okay, it takes time to learn shit.
You solved a problem your coworkers didn't. Good for you! You deserve a pat on the head for a job well done. IT is a field where all colleagues benefit from sharing and learning from one another. It's not an age thing. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you can appreciate it.
Age is a protected status in the US. You're going to get fired by HR if any of the old guys here you talking about how they suck because they're old.
This space for rent.
My office loves to tinker, and loves to solve mysteries of why stuff is broken, or kludge together temporary and permanent solutions to new problems. Whether it's salvaging a dead server by splicing it with spare parts from a distant relative, or cobbling together a visual basic script to run a strange setting on 300 workstations all at once, or figuring out that we need to turn the coffee pot back on to refill the water tank before brewing the next pot (my own discovery which still earns me accolades from my boss), we all enjoy new challenges. The average age of my office is about 30, skewed a bit by the small numbers, the owner and manager, and myself, but further balanced out by the part time college kids.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Actually, they call you Google because we have to wade through a lot of garbage to get to the relevant data when you speak.
(That summary was 3 times as long as necessary.)
Some perspective, anyone much older than the poster who is working in IT since they were 22 has had to deal with a VAST array of technology changes. Most people in the business are as eager as you are to stay on top of the latest technologies but you will find as you have a family and other life commitments that you won't have quite as much time to learn *everything*.
Sure some workplaces can be bad, I agree with other posters that if you don't fit in move along and find someplace you like better. But overall, I would guess you are not assessing your situation very clearly at the moment. Give it and your coworkers a little more time, I bet they know more than you think.
I have always been the disruptive influence, everywhere I've worked. I don't like answers like, "that's just the way we've always done it", they've never gone over well with me.
That said, you have to learn how to do it politely. You are still going to annoy people, but generally people feel good doing the best job they can. The folks that really don't like you...well, they aren't worth worrying about.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm 32. I work for the provincial government for a province in Canada. I work for the education system dealing with technology and projects including wireless networks for all of the schools, providing laptops to every teacher and netbooks to certain grades of students as the project expands. We deal with smart boards, projector systems, frontrow sound systems and senteo systems.
Sounds about right to me. I created the imagine lab we use to deploy thousands of machines using F.O.G. When the project first started we had been using ghost, ya ya, I know... Once vista and win7 rolled around we had to make a choice, buy the newest version of ghost to support them, or find a new imaging system, because our version of ghost would simply fry any vista/win7 image you tried to deploy, you had to repair each machine from the dvd individually.
I was the only one who bothered to find out why, and built the fog system around our needs, for free. Most of the people I work with know only what they need to know to get their specific task done. I'm far from 22 at this point, but I'm still the young guy here, most everyone is closer to 40 or beyond, and with the exception of a few, they simply don't keep up. I tear down and examine everything that comes into my warehouse, I want to know what it is, how it works, and most importantly, how to fix it or utilize it best.
46 years old
We are all extremely curious and have great google fu. Of course, we are halfway through our Windows 7 rollout, so we wouldn't have put an XP image on that machine. We would have used a new Win7 image.
I am the manager and only employee in the department. Pretty easy to calculate that average (46/1)
I'm one of the OLDEST in my department, yet I'm the one who learns new tech the quickest. In a previous job, it was invariably the older/experienced techs in the department that could pick up new stuff quickly, simply because they've been "picking up new stuff quickly" for a couple decades, whereas the recent high school/college gratuate whose first computer at age 4 was more powerful than my first computer post-college never had to learn arcane things, they've always been 'easy'.
Yet yes, there were/are young 'uns who are perfectly adaptable.
Age DOESN'T matter. It's just that most of the 'adaptable' older IT workers have 'adapted out' of front-line IT by now, so it's the less-adaptable ones you young 'uns see in the front lines.
Just keep doing what you're doing. Your coworkers will appreciate all of the amazing talents you bring to their table. You'll be the toast of your workgroup and your team will celebrate your successes. That or you'll never be asked to come along to the after work beer.
"What is the average age of your workplace?' 45
"How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology?" Most absorb and implement it very quickly.
Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?" Depends on the organizations culture.
You seem bright, eager to learn and motivated. So I suggest:
Finding work where that is celebrated, or go to a company that is in what field you want, and after a year start your own business.
Anything else will be a waste for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There seems so much wrong with your post.... the first thing this "old dog" would have checked is if these new boxes had a standard BIOS or running UEFI. Sounds like you have a lot of incompetent people working in your shop. I probably would have questioned the move back to XP in the first place... why? Was it a legacy software issue? Was it something that could not be solved by using compatibility mode or re-compiling the software? Did anybody bother to do a proper business case, and perform a risk assessment, including the possibility that the newer hardware may not have suitable drivers, for example?
Also, at 22, perhaps you still don't understand how stupid you sound when you make sweeping generalizations about "old dogs" and their ability to cope with new technology.
Your office also sucks. If that is what passes for IT, I'd suggest HR purge them and hire former Geek Squad employees, as they are probably better at the work (and I say that seriously, though I am loathe to ever let them touch a PC of a friend or family).
Here's the thing - in a large enterprise, if you have to touch *every* box to make a change, that's a significant time sink and not a good use of personnel. What did you do, throw the switch, see it worked and immediately go to the pointy-haired boss to tell him?
Are your co-workers really groaning because they won't learn something new? Given we're talking about BIOS settings, that seems unlikely. It's possible you just have a bunch of lazy, disgruntled co-workers; but it's also possible they know stuff about your workplace that you don't. If we're talking about a large enterprise - if the boxes you guys ordered don't work with the setup you want to use, something went wrong. Either the order itself was incorrectly filled, or the person choosing the hardware didn't actually take into account every factor he should have.
I learned a whole heck of a lot in college; but I quickly found out most of the stuff I needed to know for work couldn't be learned anywhere but on the job. Don't assume you know everything.
#DeleteChrome
If you're in a place that's buying new computers and loading Windows XP on them, you're not the problem. The final date for new Windows XP OEM installs was October 22, 2010. There are still people running Windows XP, but you shouldn't be installing it on new hardware at this late date.
Exactly; there's a lot of reinvention of the wheel going on, especially in the computer world, such as people coming up with yet another new programming language because they didn't like the other ones for some reason. Obligatory XKCD. It's fun learning something that's truly new and interesting and actually useful. It's not fun learning some stupid half-assed new shit that someone make up because they had too much time on their hands and wanted to make a name for themselves; a good example of this is GNOME 3.
It's not a matter of age. I know a lot of 20-something engineers who're the same way, they aren't interested in knowing anything about what's under the hood. Myself, I'm pushing 50 and want to know all the details and pick up the newest stuff (even if it's not useful, it's helpful to know it so I can provide solid examples to managers of why it's not useful). Some people like to learn and experiment and investigate, some don't.
I'm also guilty of the same attitude at times. I treat my Windows 7 work desktop as a tool: it exists to run Visual Studio and various other development tools and the Cygwin environment and PuTTY that give me access to the Unix boxes. IT (supposedly) owns the system, IT (supposedly) manages it, I keep my fingers out of all of it outside the tools I work with. If it breaks I don't mess with it, I call IT and let them sort it out. I'll experiment all day on my home machines, but the work desktop's IT's turf and I'm not going mucking about with it making a mess they'll have to clean up. (Although oddly enough the development tools and related stuff like SQL Server and IIS, the bits I do mess with, are the things that rarely if ever have problems. It's usually the parts IT maintains that go pear-shaped.)
It could be that your coworkers don't want to spend time learning new things. It could also be that they understand the magnitude of effort required to change systems more than you do. It sounds like, in the case of the new computers, you solved a problem they didn't solve - good job! In general, there may be circumstances in which it does not make business sense to invest in new systems.
When you write things like "after almost 30 seconds I fixed the problem" you sound cocky. When you say things like "I'm young and learn stuff and old people don't learn stuff, what's up with that?" you sound cocky and naive. You could be RIGHT... but I recommend you work on your communication skills.
I'm 50. I've worked in a lot of different shops, as well as for myself. Not all shops are like you describe, but some of them are. Most are a mixture of different personalities. There are some people who are like your co-workers. They find a comfort zone and stay with it. Age doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. I am one of the older people in my shop, but like you I want to dig into things and solve problems. There are younger members in my shop who just plain don't seem to understand how information systems work, either at a hardware or software level. Even now I can see younger coders getting too comfortable in their particular environments and unwilling to learn new things. It's frustrating, I know.
Some day you may get a chance to work on your own. Take it.
Proverbs 21:19
I was like you when I started working in IT (oddly enough at the age of 22), I'm 35 now and the best advice I can give you is do amazing things with humility and always try to see things from others point of view before jumping into action. And yes, it's not easy because at the core most geeks tend to want to act on problems right away.
I ripped into everything, always trying to show that "things could get done if you put your mind to it". The trouble is you start to learn that some battles aren't worth the effort no matter how interesting because you will eventually have more important things to do. If I got a load of servers out of the box that didn't work I'd send 'em back for alternatives that did, not because I can't spend the time to figure out why they don't work but because I got bigger things to worry about.
From a social perspective you may start to put barriers in front of yourself by working around people instead of with them, solve problems right but careful of stepping on toes. Having people resent you is way worse than busted hardware!
The irony is that when you get a bit older you'll realize what stupid questions those are.
... or is it an attempt at some self-congratulatory celebration that just needs more spectactors?
(my question is a bit recursive...)
What a biased and egoistic worldview.
There are a lot of places like that. There are other places where nearly every individual thinks they know everything because they know a thing or two about a given subject (be it computers, physics, law, etc). I'm about 10 years older than you. After working at a couple of different places my take away has been:
1) Try new things and don't be afraid to fail.
2) Don't be afraid to stop and re-evaluate if you are doing it wrong.
3) Be humble.
To answer your questions:
1) Probably somewhere around 35.
2) Very easily (Maybe sometimes too easily.)
3) Some people (and some companies) are more like that than others.
You might want to work for a startup if you want a more hands-on culture.
I am 51. You know the old dog that sits right across where you sit. Now get back to work, you will be lucky if you still have a job on Monday. You better have that task done when I come in on Monday morning. Work all week-end if needed. I won't wait until next Thursday as per your inflated estimates.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Some businesses are conservative and rightly so, momentum is slow and precise, changes are incremental and measured. Think mainframes churning through Cobol from the 60's. Bleeding edge things come and go and so do the problems they bring, but what works for years will generally keep working if left to its own devices. As for your company, there may be a business case to build a lab with XP (say most of your customers have XP). It doesn't excuse why your coworkers didn't take the initiative of figuring out why it didn't work but not everything new is awesome and not everything old is bad, you'll learn that after a few years of experience.
Furthermore you will probably soon learn that IT is there to support business not the other way around, unless you are company's goal is to produce IT products, chances are you are there to support your business unit or another company's business. You sound like you are enamored with the technology and want to play with technology for technology's sake, most veterans I've talked with are more concerned about things like uptime, scalability, change management, security, etc... Cool factor plays a part but that's a pretty poor indicator of professional skill, I've known plenty of "nerds" that love playing with new technology but couldn't design and coordinate a real IT project without all sorts of issues (thats the problem with cowboys). The best IT professionals will always keep the lights on, that's your primary goal.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Well. I am 37. Formally I am not really an IT guy (PhD in physics). I am not the youngest and there are a lot of people who are younger than me and are less open to learning something new (on IT or otherwise). My priorities changed a little since i was 22.
1) You have to accept that you are doing things which must be maintained by your coworkers. The number of skills involved in maintainign somthing decreases the chance that it will be maintained exponentially.
2) There is a reason for sending back a batch of PCs which dont perform as specified (If i order machines which run XP from a computer store, i expect that they solve the problem). Otherwise I leave it to the 22year old in the group. i am not interested in learning about the incpomatibilities of XP and they (22j olds) seem to be good in remembering senseless shit, probably obsolete with the next SP of windows (or the next version).
3) I know a lot of programming languages, however i can tell you that focusing one one or twowill be a good thing for you. it is not up to me to judge if its good or bad (i dont like it), but you can earn a lot of reputation by having something where you are better than anybody else around. There are two reasons for this: a) a lot of people will exchnage their ideas with you, since your skill may touch their topic b) combine your skill with other experts and your team will easily outperform the team of generalists. (a am in such a situation. I am a matlab expert and work together with a database expert on a joint project and we are doing things and demonstrations in timescales and quality unimaginable for generalists).
4) Being the girl or boy for everything will get you recognition in a good team, but in a bad team it maybe does not pay off. Be careful.
There are two ways to get ahead in your career: a.) know your shit, and b.) don't be a dick. Either one will let you keep a job, and maybe even advance, but if you really want to get ahead in this world, you need to master both skills. Like most 22 year-olds, you appear to have focused your entire life around column a, and haven't put any effort into column b.
And for fuck's sake cut the old guys some slack. They probably know all kinds of obscure shit about making boot disks, compiling the OS from source, mainframe backups, configuring zfs, or whatever new and exciting knowledge there was to glean for IT workers back when they were 22.
It's the same everywhere. Nothing is universally true, but I would say it works out like this:
80% of young guys (sub-30) are interested in learning new tech, 20% aren't
80% of guys over 30 have no interest - they have an established family and home life and are done "learning". 20% are still interested.
Learn the ins-and-outs of RS-232 serial communication. I'm in my 50s and had a contract job a bit over a year ago at Clearwire bringing on-line new data centers. We were sent to various cities and instructed to bring up dozens of pieces of new equipment freshly installed. The first way you're going to talk to most of this data center stuff is via serial console, at least enough to get it talking IP. Because I had spent many years supporting terminal applications (where terminal means VT100 or a Wyse dumb terminal) I was the go-to guy for serial questions.
First get to know a good terminal program for your OS. I happen to like minicom for BSD/Linux boxes. It reminds me of the old telex program for my DOS days. Learn how to use a volt meter or a break-out-box to figure out which pins are sending and receiving. Google/wiki up the pin-outs for 9 and 25 pin connectors. Learn what the difference between software and hardware handshaking is (hint, XON and XOFF are ASCII control symbols.) Learn the difference between IEEE-232 (old RS-232C, +-12VDC swing) voltage levels and "TTL" (+5/ground swing) levels, and how to build a box to convert them.
Serial communication is the POTS line of data center work. Second is to learn basic phone (POTS) wiring standards. Those old technologies are still used as systems of last resort.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I doubt that they resent *your* interest in learning about new technology. There's nothing wrong with that in isolation, and it's difficult to imagine your colleagues resenting your enthusiasm by itself.
Also, you mention "nearly all of my coworkers" - that implies many people. In any social conflict of one vs. many, what are the odds that all of the many are wrong?
I'd like to suggest three alternative explanations that seem more plausible:
The bad news is that all of these problems are not simply "their resentment," but real effects of your behavior. The good news is that when your behavior is the problem, the solution is simply changing your behavior. It's fully within your control. You can evaluate the adverse effects of your actions and find alternative behaviors with less adverse effects.
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
It does not seem believable to me that an IT staff with any level of experience or knowledge would not google 'computer model' +winxp, which is the sum total of effort that should be required.
Perhaps his next environment will be the same...and the one after that....and perhaps the fourth as well.... Maybe by the fifth he'll wonder if the issue isn't the workplace or culture, but more between the ears of the viewer.
I'm not saying he's not a brilliant, young up-and-comer that can do no wrong and has to fight the righteous fight against the entrenched evil old men that are ruining the world around him.... But I would say that sounds a lot like half the movies coming out of Hollywood. If he's that good...and his shop that bad....he should have *PLENTY* of contemporaries in other companies that could get him into a healthier IT culture.
...many things, one of which is that your time is better spent on problems of importance. While you should be commended for solving the UEFI problem, sending the units back and getting new ones costs relatively little, and allows your coworkers to spend their time on better uses than trying to solve a problem that can apparently be solved by a fresh 22 year old. It's important to distinguish between things that matter and things that don't, and while new tech can be interesting and you would be wise to keep yourself relevant by staying up with it, you need to determine how much time it's worth spending on learning new tech versus mastering the stuff you're dealing with on a daily basis. If you spend too much time on the newest stuff, you'll have plenty of breadth, but lack for depth.
I'm well into my 40's, and it's the opposite around here. The young guys here have no patience (or deeper understanding) for technology and are the ones that are ready to kick something to the curb when they can't get it to work, but I'm willing to take the time to figure out why it's not working. When our KVM switch failed and smoked, I was the one to pull out a multimeter and discovered that the power supply had failed, and I was the one that took a PC power supply and wired it up as a replacement. They are too used to the disposable economy where everything that breaks is unfixable and needs to be replaced.
It's well past the time when I can debug a PC using an oscilloscope "hey, look, something is is generating an IRQ conflict - are you sure the DIP switches are set correctly on that new board?!", but my EE background still helps me troubleshoot hardware problems - and my background in software development (from back before frameworks and libraries took care of the heavy lifting) helps troubleshoot software problems. Things like "I don't get it, we moved it from a quad core machine to a 16 core machine, but the app is just as slow as it was before!" are much easier to explain when you know the difference between a single-threaded and multi-threaded app. We're hiring guys fresh out of school that barely know what a compiler is, but when I was in school, we had to write a compiler (and assembler). Then again, they are much more adept at programming with modern libraries and frameworks than I am.
The funny thing is that I'm a "manager", and haven't been doing hands-on sys admin for quite some time, but I'm still the go-to guy for weird problems that no one else can solve.
I've worked with tons of people in my IT career (roughly 15 years now, mostly with a Fortune 100). The cross-section of "elite" people who had the knack and enthusiasm for tech wizardry and learning were all ages, all genders, all races, etc... and pretty even distribution at that. Those who couldn't handle tech and learning well were also evenly distributed. Trying to correlate various factors and put people in categorical boxes is not only a nasty, frowned-upon behavior, but it leads to fewer friends, fewer opportunities, and greater inaccuracy in all things. I like to appreciate or dislike people for exactly who they are. :-)
Check your demeanor in how you deliver answers and solutions... everyone has their own sense of pride and don't like to hear condescension... negative reactions to your solutions may really be negative reactions to smugness. Also, "new" is not always "better." If something new actually sucks, commiserate with your coworkers about how MS Ribbon is Fischer Price crap, etc... and it will help build rapport. You'll be seen less as the new-stuff-addict and more as truly a source of tech-wisdom.
If you're truly the tech badass in your team, that means you can participate in sharing and mutual bettering with the office-politics-badass and the communication-badass and the customer-relations-badass, etc... If you're missing/wanting to get into great discussions and mutual knowledge sharing on cutting edge stuff, check out your local 2600, Makers, Hackerspace, programming language user groups, etc...
You badly need an attitude adjustment. IT is a team effort, and it sounds like you've managed to rub your colleagues the wrong way by being something of a smug know-it-all. Unfortunately, this attitude is all too common in young technology professionals across the board.
and passion for learning and doing the Right Thing.
Now I urge you to be cautious, not of hatred and backstabbing from those less brilliant and energized than you... but of becoming arrogant. Arrogance blinds.
I am more than twice your age. I was like you, at your age... and other than age, I still am.
If I had been in your crowd of co-workers, would you have assumed I would have opposed your "unorthodox" answer because I'm old and decrepit?
Of course, I wouldn't have been "badmouthing" the idea; I would have been over in the corner poking with the system's boot options and eventually would have uncovered the same thing. Maybe before you.
--Yoda, or at least he should have. After all, he was 900 years old!
Anyway, arrogance. It leads you to underestimate, and makes you enemies, some of which you really can't afford to underestimate. And it's completely unnecessary. Humble self-assured competence is enough. Arrogance detracts.
So. Not all of us old crusties are beyond seeing the wonder and potential of modern technology, so don't assume all of are. Furthermore, look around at your age peers. A lot of them aren't interested in the deep magic of technology; they just want an appliance to check Facebook. Preferably one with the logo of a piece of fruit with a bit taken out, because that's what the herd likes nowadays.
It's not age. It's the nerd spark; some have it, some don't and actions are the only real proof.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I work in a very mixed IT environment. We have young & old of both genders. At current our top desktop support person (who would have handled the issue you just mentioned) must be in his mid 40's. He's awesome, and does very fast, detailed research. As well we have younger members who always want the answers handed to them and wont approach an issue unless the boss hands them a "how to". I think there is a level of burnout that occurs (I get sick of looking at a computer screen all day myself), but usually if it's an interesting problem the neurons go to work.
That said I would like to have some Augmented Reality at an affordable price point so I can get away from sitting and staring at a screen.
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Welcome to generational differences. I hope you enjoy your stay. And yes, this exists pretty much everywhere - although maybe not to the point you describe here. Depends on the people you hire, too. But speaking generally, it's a generational thing.
Every generation approaches their work in a different way. I spoke about this a few years ago at Penguicon in my Linux in the Enterprise (Powerpoint) talk. Although my slides don't have a lot of text on them, so you may not get much benefit by looking at the slides on their own. You can also find more on my blog.
In my Penguicon talk, it was about how to pitch Linux to the higher-ups. I mentioned 3 generations that might be your manager. In your case, you are likely experiencing only 2 of these groups:
Folks in their 30's and 40's tend to be very conservative. I don't mean to say politically conservative but conservative in their actions. Other slashdotters who are about my age likely saw one of their parents get laid off from their jobs while we were growing up. If your parents weren't laid off, I'm sure one or more of your friends' parents were. And while we may not recognize it, that caused many of my generation to think conservatively. We don't want to see that happen to us. So we tend to view things in terms of risk. Many in my generation are risk-averse, so you really need to be careful in how you introduce new technology and new concepts to them. Approach it as a way to reduce risk or to make things easier. Don't just jump in and expect them to follow, because they're waiting to see what you'll make of it before they touch it. Will this be something that "sticks" or will it be another flash-in-the-pan that goes away after a little while, so a waste of time to learn?
The boomer generation is different. That generation is often motivated by societal change. Witness the societal upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. And they definitely didn't grow up with technology, they probably "fell into it" and got their start working on mainframes. If they are honest, they may tell you they're more interested in society and social networks (this the generation that Classmates.com was built for) and less motivated by technology. Since they didn't grow up with technology, the boomer generation may not always be comfortable with the rate of change in technology - even those who work in technology. In general, don't expect boomers to share your enthusiasm for new technology. You may need to walk these folks through it. Draw parallels for them, show how this new thing is basically like this other older thing, but with a few improvements.
If you look at your coworkers' behaviors as a symptom of generational differences, you'll be pretty far along.
Your generation, by the way, is often very self-motivated to go search stuff out on their own. (You mentioned this in your post.) Kids in your generation don't often stop to bring other people into what they are doing, they just do their own research. (Sound familiar?) And your generation typically is not interested in going through the same "levels" that previous generations were content to follow. So while you didn't mention this in your post, I'll give it as a caution: if you find that your boss's boss is an expert in some area that you're working on, you probably will just send an email to pick his/her brain on the topic. You wouldn't think anything of it; that's the expert, so you asked. Your boss's boss will probably answer you, too, because that person is probably a boomer - and remember, boomers tend to be motivated by social networking. So your boss's boss will find it hard to resist having that dialogue with you.
And in doing so, you will have piss
I am 49 and I too have been called "Google" many times. I have OCD which manifests itself in the need to know everything. Most people do not have that drive. They work with what they know and only gain the knowledge they need to get the job done. The issue with that is that one does not know what to look for if one does not know it is there. Perhaps they never looked in the BIOS because it never crossed their mind that there could be new parameters in the newer BIOS. If one is not aware that UEFI exists then why look for it?
In this instance the main issue is subtlety. I bet the other techs thought that XP "should" be able to be installed on a machine that install win7 without screwing around with the bios. The presence of one poorly documented bios attribute causing such trouble is very annoying. The fact that the bios is almost the same is frustrating because most of what one knows is valid but one never knows what changed until the change is run into as in this case.
Perhaps your coworkers are grousing about the following;
1. The stupid decision to use an old OS on a computer that was designed for a newer OS.
2. The presences of yet another poorly documented BIOS switch that has major effects on procedures.
3. Now a there are two different procedures for a new piece of hardware; one for an box without UEFI and one for a box with UEFI and little indication of which one is being worked with. How many times have you heard "Crap, I didn't realize this was a 'new' box. I hate these new boxes'.
4. The possibility that more issues will crop up in the future due to the stupid decision. How many times will we have some user or tech who thinks he knows what to do reset the bios and XP will no longer work? What other bios "features" will screw up the XP installation in the future?
I don't see how you or any of your co-workers are remotely IT related. UEFI vs. BIOS? Really? Fiddling with images for that long? Using a Windows install straight out of the factory? Thinking that because there is a factory-installed Windows license that it is even valid for your institution (it's not, you have to shell out for an Enterprise-deal)?
And you're the knowledgeable one? I am imagining a room full of IT guys that maybe have 200 machines to handle (which, one person should be able to do by himself) and that simply buy solution upon solution because they haven't a clue how stuff works.
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You may discover someone in your group who can do nothing without referring to his/her notes, or looking on-line. Treasure those people instead of deriding them. Let them watch and document your problem solving, and you will never have to do the same problem twice. Your co-worker will jump at the chance to takle that problem next time.
Synergy is NOT about like minds, but about diverse minds acting for a single purpose/goal, and its worth striving for.
57 here, and still curious and interested!
I completely agree, although there are many people who are lazy, have no passion, and have pretty much given up on life. Though I like to take that as an opportunity to try and encourage those people and bring passion back into their lives.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
I was like you. I started my first job in computers at 19. I have a passion for technology and ran circles around my older co-workers. Despite being the fastest at solving problems I was among the first to get sacked when layoffs came up.
Now that I am near 40 I do occasionally see a younger version of myself and get easily annoyed. Mostly because the younger version of me cannot see the bigger picture and properly prioritize the best use of his talent.
You see yourself as helping by changing the BIOS settings, the older folks see you as mostly bouncing off the walls and occasionally getting something important right.
I know the 19 year old version of myself isn't going to understand a word of this but I'll give it a go nonetheless. If I have any advice it would be to try as hard as you can see things from their perspective through a lens of maturity. What seems like an hour to you, seems like 10 minutes to them. Try to learn what is really important more than what you think is important.
You are like a Dukati in rush hour traffic, zipping between cars is only going to piss people off. Going the same pace as everyone else, and occasional passing the slow poke in style isn't going to bother anyone but the slow poke.
You making a system faster and more efficient isn't very important if it has a side effect of crashing at 2am on a Sunday night a few weeks later.
You'd probably have gotten an amused and approving 'd'oh!' from your co-workers over the bios thing if you didn't already have a reputation for being the over-anxious newbie. The lesson is this: don't rub their noses in your eagerness to learn everything. It's not as impressive as you think it is. They've already figured out how much new stuff is actually useful in their lives. You will, too. Celebrate your actual successes (like the bios thing) modestly and with good humor.
Age is everything to do with it, I'm afraid.
This week, you've saved a bit of time and paperwork that may, or may not, make a difference to the overall profitability of the place you work, by happening to have the right bit of knowledge at the right time. Next week, you'll be the guy that fixes things.
I guarantee you, however, that not everything you read on Google is correct. And, one day, you'll apply your skills to a few thousand dollars-worth of equipment and, through carelessness or misinformation or a pesky warranty violation, you'll stop being the guy that fixes things.
That'll be the day when you'll decide that being a jack-of-all trades is not necessarily an advantage in this world. It is sometimes better just to do one thing right, and let other people earn a living at what they're good at. That'll be the day when, if you keep your job, you'll turn into a "stubborn case-screw" who reckons that a regular income beats bragging rights.
But don't stop until you do. Your colleagues will have learnt that lesson the hard way, and will be looking forward to when you do the same.
IT needs a different education system. Some like a trades system where you can have on going education that is not tied to a college time table.
Also it can fix the issues where you have people who learned on there own / when to tech schools but have a hard time getting a IT job as they don't have a CS as well the other side where you have people with CS trying to do IT that have no idea as CS is not IT.
A lot of people have been giving you crap for sounding like the fresh-faced "I know everything computer-y!" kid you are, and I won't pile it on, other than to say I agree with them. I will advise you, though. You should set a default fall-back mode to settle into whenever you've solved a workplace problem. Do this until you can recognize just how you sounded when you were 22, which is usually somewhere around 30, but may take as long as your 50s, if you're an exceptional douchebag. The major indicator of when you're ready is when your career goal is success, not smugness.
Here's what you do, and I'm 100% serious about this: Whenever you solve a problem that others are struggling with, or have given up on, and are just itchy and giddy and giggly over presenting your solution, go ask someone if they need your help on a project. Let this person lead you. This does 3 things:
1) puts your focus on something other than being smug for just a little while
2) brings home that there will always be new projects to work on. While this was a battle you may have won, there's a greater war you're fighting, and your co-workers are not your adversaries. They're in the trench with you.
3) prevents you from resting on your smug little laurels and forces you to be a part of a team.
If you find you're still not liked around the office, give credit for one of your "solutions" to someone who is well-liked and well-placed in the company, and learn to mimic the grace this person uses while presenting the solution. If you STILL cannot solve problems without being smug, hit yourself in the face with a hammer once daily so you can get pity friends who'll teach you how to be a human being.
You may find that without the superiority complex, solving problems isn't as fun, but that's when you realize that doing your job well is ultimately fulfilling, not just fun, and your co-workers won't want to slap you (or sabotage you).
Above all, always remember that:
-Someone out there will always be better at something than you. The sooner your pull your head out of your ass and realize how valuable it is when that someone works with you, the better off you'll be.
-At 22, true experience is a variable you cannot even comprehend yet. No disrespect to your "over-a-year-now" in the industry, but claiming that year as experience looks tremendously foolish. Even workers who are apparently "old dogs" who can't learn new tech will have something to teach you. Do yourself a favor: Ferret that knowledge out and learn it, while keeping your mouth shut.
As for your questions, had you not made so many idiotic assumptions, you'd realize neither your questions nor their answers are useful to anybody; least of all you. The best thing you can do for your career, I promise you, is sit down, shut up, and listen for the next 5 years. You'll be 10 years ahead of where I was at 27 if you do.
So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace?
At the current place I work, the IT department has three people. One manager, and two guys in their late 20's. They are among the best and most flexible IT guys I've ever worked with.
I'm on the programming team, which is not under IT (Thankfully). I'm 35, but the average age on the team is 42ish. We're building state of the art web services and interfaces for a global, publicly traded corporation. Of the programming teams the company has around the world, we have the highest productivity, and the lowest defect rate.
How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology?
Pretty gracefully. I'm always doing new things, and they are too. My dba is learning operations, my operations guy is learning data warehousing, and I'm swapping PHP for Java with the systems guy. It's a great team, and we're all learning a lot working together.
That said, great teams are unusual, but the problem isn't age. The problem is management. The way the teams are built, the hiring process, who is running what when. It's all absolutely critical to the way the team works, and the mentality of the group. I've worked for companies both bigger and smaller that have problems teaching people because for whatever reason, the people involved hit a rut. You can hit a rut indavidually or as a group at any age.
I was responsible for training a group of 22 year olds at the last company I worked for. Seven guys. One of them was a shining star (and the youngest of the group). All of the other ones refused to listen to reason because this isn't how it worked in the class room. Truth is, nothing in a production environment ever works the way it does in a class room. It's just the way it goes. My short coming, I think was in failing to get that through their freshly educated heads.
Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
I'm going to get slack for saying this, but as a rule, in general, programmers (just them, not all IT people) are the most xenophobic, change hating people I've ever met. Some of them just love the stuff. And the ones that do are okay. But I would say anecdotally, maybe as much as 30% of them are scared shitless of the next big change, and losing their jobs to kids straight out of school who think they know the latest and greatest thing.
My thought has always been that you should never sign up as an agent of change unless you're steadfast and eager to constantly stay on top of your game.
How well you do at it depends entirely on your character, your compensation, and your motivation.
Take care.
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First off, I'm now 37 and I've been in IT for over 15 years. I can also say that I had similar feelings when I was 16 and first starting with PCs. For instance, I stuck with old MFM/RLL drives for awhile because I knew that technology but didn't know IDE, which was already a few years old. I later started learning to move with technology and have continued to do so.
I presently work at the Federal government and have had similar frustrations. It really has little to do with age and more to do with mentality. People get stuck in their old ways and are reluctant to change. My boss was that way in the beginning but, fortunately, he had an open enough mind where when I started slowly introducing newer technologies, like virtualization, he came to accept them. He also saw the wisdom in standardizing such things as backups and operating systems so that we weren't having to juggle 5-6 different platforms to get stuff done.
That said, standards and procedures exist for a reason. Someone like the OP is likely to be a lot more reckless when it comes to poking around and changing things. Just because something is newer doesn't necessarily mean it will fit the environment and/or application. Also, there are numerous other factors to consider such as vendor support, upgrade paths, downtime, etc. In a typical environment you will see not see newer technologies (outside of maybe a lab environment) until they've been tried and tested in the industry.
Our best/most valuable/most knowlegable/most flexible team member is 78. He can figure most everything out, and you only have to tell him once. He's only been here 23 years, I hear.
6 years ago I took a gig installing some servers. Among them were some Itanium boxes, and the lead asked who had worked with Itanium before. After everyone else shook their heads, I said I'd have a look at them. Yes, they were UEFI BIOS, and it took me an hour to work out the process to set things and get them ready to boot. In went the server CDs, then the image CDs, then I spent a week getting the images working on the new hardware. We had been assured that the rack and stack was the hard part, and that the images were sound and good to go. Of course not, newer model hardware etc. made that impossible. In a week we, as a team, had new locally updated images loading away without errors, and the Itaniums were online and working on Day 5. No Google, no cheats, I just had to sit down and figure it out. I was 52 at the time, and the oldster on the team, and no one knew it. I pass for 15 years younger in person.
My job now, I'm most valuable not because of my experience, or persistence, or ability to figure stuff out, though all that is critical. What sets me apart is my ability to work with customers of any skill level or temperment, defuse bad situations, and recover from my own and others' gaffes. And I;m not really that good at it. Techies are notoriously bad at customer relations. But it's learnable, and you can Google it up and gain a great deal of good advice.
Be patient with your co-workers, share with them as much as they will tolerate, speak no ill of them, and be patient. You'll either run the place one day or be in a much better position.
There are only three questions to ask of a job candidate. "Can you?" "Will you?" "Will you fit in?" No one is more important than the other. Learn to fit in, because this is the thing you cannot go to school for. All else is taught or summoned up by many. Fitting in is the real struggle. It may not always save your job, but it will not lose you one.
Just don't lose the learn everything attitude. My wife doesn't quite get the concept that in IT your work changes every 3-4 years. She teaches music. Asking her to imagine having to learn new scales, instruments, and signatures every 3-4 years doesn't make any sense to her. She can't imagine it. I've been at this since MS-DOS 2.2. Things have changed.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
45
Very rarely, and only when it is 10+ years old and they've spent the past 6 years resisting it.
No, they vary a lot. I always recommend that people contract for at least 2 years trying to work at 3-4 places to learn just how different they all are, and find out what you like the most. Big or small companies? Startups or fortune 500s?
Humility goes a long way at making friends, and limiting the damage when you appear to step on toes. "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." It is tempting to think of yourself as better than others. Overcome that temptation. It won't eliminate jelousy, but it will help to put more people on your side when it rises.
I have a question for you:
Have you tried installing Linux on all the machines to see if that makes your co-workers happy?
I am 36 and I still want to know everything about everything and spend ridiculous time and energy researching all the things that interest me. I have noticed that most people do not share the compulsive need to know. Just as you probably won't grow out of it, they will probably not grow into it. I wouldn't waste time on further analysis of that scenario. If this is OCD, who really gives a damn?
I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname 'Google' because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information
my god. if someone at work told me their nickname was "google", i'd do whatever i could to avoid contact with them. you are lucky your coworkers haven't strangled you yet.
seriously, actions speak louder than words. shut up and do your job, and do it good. don't worry about what everyone else is doing. if you really are the superstar you think, then you'll be noticed.
2) Once you gain some experience, start looking for someplace where the Giants of the IT industry go when they get good at what they do. I'm 54 and I have the same drive and determination to know everything as you do, but I also work at a research institution where you have to work with others whom are equally gifted. Its not a competition because there is always somebody better at something than you. When you fly with Superman its hard to stand out, but you certainly learn *a lot every day.
If you keep the attitude that you are “Competing” the way you do, it isn't going to win you friendship or admiration from your peers, no matter what their age. Its not their age that is the problem, as I am a perfect counter example. Its their personal initiative to 'be the best that they can be' that is lacking. You will never change that in a person, so don't even try. They will resent anyone that keeps pointing that out to them. Focus instead on helping to make *their* lives/jobs easy and they will then appreciate you being around, and you will eventually earn their full respect, and eventually get the more interesting work and be asked to make key decisions. When management sees your peers actually depending on you for things you will in turn earn their respect. It only gets better from there. Teamwork is always the winning strategy.
Because you asked direct questions I will answer them, rather than providing a list of snarky remarks.
What is the average age of your workplace?
I work for what I believe is actually a fairly young company. The average age is probably 30, possibly slightly higher but I wouldn't expect it to be over 35.
How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology?
We're a bunch of geeks - we LIVE for new technology. That's not to say we accept everything with open arms, there's plenty of bitching when something bucks the norm, but for the most part we like new stuff and we like integrating it into our clients' environments.
Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
I believe most IT people are interested in fancy new technology, making it work, and integrating it with things they are already familiar with. However, there are people who are just in it for the money and probably don't have the interest in geeky exploration. They took required courses and fulfill a specific role. If you ask them to do something outside of that role they will become agitated quickly.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
You're going to run into this kind of waste and mediocracy your entire life. Some people are innovators, other people are parasites and warm bodies.
For now, you're getting paid, aren't you?
Career-wise, try to network with other people who are innovators. Always keep going for the higher paying opportunity until your price rises to meet your ability.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Congratulations on getting your story about how awesome you are on Slashdot. I am not going to answer any of your questions because it's clear that wasn't your goal anyway.
"The problem with learning everything about a system is that once that system becomes obsolete, all that work was wasted. After doing that a few times, we all drift toward learning the minimum required for the immediate problem. When that's not enough, we're grateful to have young folks around who still want to learn every little detail."
I was 20 when a 40-something programmer told me this. I told him I hoped nothing like that ever happened to me, but he just chuckled. I'm 53 now, and something much worse happened: I became a manager! :-)
My advice: do it while you enjoy it, and take pride in it while you can. Try not to rub it in when you manage to save the day; be modest and people will shower you with praise.
--Greg
I don't know the full story, but it could be that your coworkers were mandated to install XP, weren't allowed to install Windows 7, and wanted management to learn the hard way that they shot themselves in the foot with the mandate. Management being proved wrong would then give the department the political capital necessary to get approval for the Win 7 licenses. If the people above you prevent you from doing your job, sometimes you just have to let them walk of a cliff so they'll come back and give you what you need to do your job. That's sometimes the only way that process in IT happens.
And when you learn this you'll start to resent less experienced, college-fresh IT people who try to prove they're smart by doing everything they to help the folks high up avoid the desperately needed teachable moment that moves your organization forward. Don't take offense; we've all been that young naive guy at some point.
At some point in the future, you are going to screw up badly at work. It's inevitable: you do something every day for years, you're going to make a mistake. When that day comes, do you want to be known as the arrogant one in the office that's always complaining?
Or do you want to be the one that everyone remembers for patiently helping them out with their work, so that you can rely on colleagues to help you out, minimise the fallout and defend you to management?
This is neither IT or age related. You are a hacker, they are not. Get used to it.
on you home page? and you want people to hire you?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I did front-line tech support for a few years. This was back in the days of '95 and 2000 so things broke a lot more then than they do now. The team had a guy in it that wasn't interested at all in being a tech, he was just there to game the system and do the bare minimum. He used to check the job queue every day and take every mouse replacement or easy job on there to make his stats look good to the management without actually having to learn or do anything. Now some people would get frustrated at having a guy like that in a team, but to me he was perfect as it meant that I got more than my share of the interesting and downright weird problems to look at. Building relationships outside of the team trying to nail down the obscure stuff got me noticed and made my career.
Must be getting the from the XP Fairy... ;-)
Our clients still run everything from 98 and 2000 to Windows 7. If it aint broke (well in the case of Windows 98 even if it is.) Now writing software that runs on all of those configurations is what I like to call job security ;-P
I don't know why this was modded down; it's damn good advice. Technology has become easy enough that anyone who's been doing it can almost certainly continue to with sufficiently successful results. Now it's more a matter of can you fit in with the culture and personalities at a given place.
When I go for or sit in on interviews, it's pretty much assumed the candidate can do the job, so they want to know what s/he's like to work with. Be easy to work with. Do what it takes to pull that off, even if it goes against your true nature. That's your #1 job skill nowadays.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
choice1 Play it safe. Continue to learn. But do not show off. Allow some of the seniors who are kind and who you like to take credit for some of the work you do. Fit in, and you will get ahead faster than many others but not super fast.
choice 2 Build a network of contacts. Market yourself. Find one great skill you have in something you love doing. Find someone to back you up and form your own company. Find a talented middle manager in your company two or three levels above you who is frustrated by not being able to move up. Show your talent and form a partnership. Have a plan to be your own boss before you lose the enthu or the youth.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm sure you'd like to thing your age gives you some sort of advantage but that's not it. Geeks are fairly intolerant of difference (ie someone using an OS they don't use) and they hate change (i.e. Windows 8, Firefox updates or even trival UI changes) and that happens across all ages.
Oops, that could be taken as insulting where absolutely not meant to be. Make that "...even if it goes against a part of your true nature."
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
That comes with age. There's also a certain level of need to just get stuff done. At a certain point USING knowledge becomes the overriding concern, and you have so many tools in your toolbox that one more becomes less and less useful. You also begin to find that there's very little that is really new under the Sun in most fields. As a software engineer I see fads in languages, dev tools, databases, etc, and hear all about how some new guy is sure that it is a whole new revolutionary better way to do stuff. Often some new tool IS useful, but it is also often something that existed 30 years ago that everyone has just sort of forgotten about and it got renamed/reinvented and we long ago learned what its limitations were and moved on to other things (probably when we were 24 or so...).
There's also a certain factor of luck in terms of poking around at stuff. Yeah, you did debug something in a snap, which is good, congrats. OTOH I might look over your shoulder tomorrow and spot something you missed too. I don't know the guys you work with, but they probably managed before. Maybe they're bumblers, and maybe they just missed something. Ironically the more secure you become in your knowledge the easier it can be to miss some small detail that you 'know'. Today I was totally thwarted by some stupid piece of bad design in python that caused a webapp I was deploying to balk at reading a file. My associate figured it out, somehow. Python's split() function is just stupidly designed. Being an old Perl guy from way back I assumed NOBODY could be that stupid, but yes they can! He doesn't know perl from beans and thus less knowledge = solution. Ironic, but it goes that way sometimes.
One thing is for sure. I learned back around 26 not to be cocky, lol. That's a danger to avoid. Maybe I'm hot shit, but I never ever speak ill of anyone or brag about anything nowadays. It works. Only the VERY best of the best get away with the cocky routine for long... ;) (not saying you're cocky, just remember not to get that way).
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Why do I feel that OP is the type to then go around complaining that all the new workstations for the secretaries have i3's and generic Intel video cards instead of i7's with nvidia cards with 2gb's of ddr5 (or whatever they are up to) RAM?
That your co-workers aren't very motivated to do their jobs. I'm old enough to be your father and I'm constantly learning. Intellectual curiosity is not an age-related thing.
That said, it doesn't necessarily mean that your co-workers are intellectually lazy. They may well just not care. Do you work for a company that treats its people poorly? Are people not rewarded for their good work? Do people just do the minimum to collect a paycheck and not get fired? All of those are usually symptoms of crappy management. If that's the case, get a couple more years experience there and then find a better environment for yourself.
People who enjoy (or who are at least recognized for it) their work generally tend to have the attitude that "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing properly."
Don't live by their example, young paduan. :) When I was just a little older than you, a mentor gave me the best advice I've ever received: "Although you may not be required to do so, you should be willing to bet your job on the work that you do." That concept has served me very well in the more than twenty years I've been in the IT business.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Don't worry about your age or how old your co-workers are. Keep doing what you're doing, keep learning, fuck anyone that resents that. I never stopped learning and improving. Even when I had employers that wouldn't pay for training, I said fuck it, and used my vacation and sent myself, if it was something I really wanted to do. I'm 40 years old now and a lot of the people I started with are still writing code on the AS/400 for the man. I have my own company and get to pick and chose what I do and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I have seen similar behaviors in every single organization that I have been a part of. I am struggling with it in my own career and I feel fortunate to have seen it happen in the past so that I know how to deal with it.
Technology works in cycles. One of the memes we see here on /. is the thin vs thick clients, or centralized versus distributed computing. What is old is new again. Once you've been through enough cycles, it gets boring. "Great, another version of Windows. Oh wow. Look, a new multi-tier application backed by SQL with a web front end... never seen that before. Special, a major version upgrade of the application our entire business runs on. I wonder how many new bugs I am going to get to squash."
There are only so many applications that a typical enterprise needs. There are only so many best ways to develop those applications. There are only so many ways to migrate data from one application to another. Etc.
Once you have been around for a while, it all gets old. After a while you start to get jaded because all systems have their strengths and weaknesses. You get tired of new systems that are worse than the old systems. That is on the tech side.
Then there is the organizational (people) side of IT. There is the "IT is a cost center" discussion where organizations justify not spending money on IT systems because it does not generate any money for the business. Even in businesses that are IT businesses, it is hard to get money sometimes. The battle I'm fighting right now involves purchasing SAN space. "What do you mean we have to buy 50% more disk space than we can account for right now in order to position us to grow? You only have $xx million in the pipeline. Why are we buying space to support $xxx million?" Trying to talk to financial people about exponential data growth is frustrating. On one hand, they are frustrated that we are constantly asking for more disk space. "Why didn't you do a better job of projecting this ahead of time?" On the other hand, they do not want to "over spend" on business that (in their opinion) might never materialize. When you are part of a practice that is generating millions of dollars in revenue a month, and one of the only players in a market that involves Fortune 50 corporations and huge financial institutions, it gets frustrating when people are crying about a few million dollars worth of SAN disk.
There are the VP of (whatever) department who minored in Information Systems 15 years ago, and now because they have had a conversation with a sales guy they think they are in the position to dictate which application the organization uses to support their department. In a previous job we dealt with this in the form of a VP of Manufacturing. He knew how to write some queries in Access so he felt confident that he could dictate the requirements for the manufacturing and accounting systems. It was a mess, and a common situations in smaller shops that cannot afford the luxury of full blown ITIL or ISO 27002 compliant IT infrastructures.
After 15-20 years of doing ANYTHING, people tend to want change. It does not even have to do with IT specifically. Do you know anyone who has done anything for 15 years? IT people get pigeon holed sometimes. "You are a DBA. You are a sysadmin. You are a ..." At first it is cool because you are a competent specialist and subject matter expert. After long enough, you just do not want to write another freaking SQL query and you are going to stab the next person who writes a SELECT statement that joins the three largest tables in the DB and exhausts the RAM on the server. I will bet you a $1000 that 90%+ of the "mobile application developers" today are going to be doing something different in ten years.
At this point in my career I have delivered enough solutions on all levels of the OSI model that I can be a competent manager. I can lead teams and take ownership of applications and business processes. I worked as a consultant so I under
Alvin Toffler said: '“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Some people in this digital age can, some can't, as is to be expected. I first pondered this when I realized I didn't want to learn to use new input hardware for gaming. Or learn a new 'gamepad' setup or what have you. I had certain configs I was used to and didn't want to 'unlearn and relearn' control of this game or that. Age certainly CAN come in to play but, as many other things, should not be used as an excuse. Just keep on learning, unlearning, and relearning till you make 6 figures my friend, forget the others and put that energy into your own development. Oh yeah, keep smiling :)
"Evil man makes you kill me...evil man makes me kill you..even tho..we're just families apart.."
As a 41 year old IT consultant I am still interested in learning everything about new technologies.
My current fascination with quantum computing even prompted me to start blogging about it.
So I'd say your co-workers are not typical - or they may be just typical for the industry you're in.
Every workplace has a "culture". To get along you need to go with the flow of the culture, or else you will be ignored or badmouthed. If you don't like the culture, move on to a diff organization.
I don't know if your issues are about age or the management style or the organization style, etc. It is what it is. Go with the flow.
That's life, good or bad.
My I suggest a start-up or small company for you? They will appreciate type-A tenacious "doers" more. Just be prepared to do semi- or non-IT work also.
Table-ized A.I.
Generally the larger the IT department, the more resistant it is to change, the slower new things are adopted, and the more paperwork/hoops there are to deal with.
Conversely, the larger the IT department is, the less often things break, the more plans there are for failover, and the more hands there are to make light work.
You work with dinosaurs. I was in a Fortune 500 IT department 3 months ago, and their main desktop support guy and I were learning UEFI and GPT so that we had it for later. The "decision makers" were just approving our long-term plan to move from XP to Win7 Pro 32bit. 64bit was verboten until next year, possibly later, because some important line-of-business software was not 64bit ready.
I now work a mile down the road, and am the entire IT department. I am free to adopt anything and everything I can justify. I'm slowly moving all the machines from XP to Win7 64, but beyond that have few plans to 'get crazy' simply because I don't have time to implement anything exciting.
Also, these are all generalizations and anecdotes, generalizations are never correct, and anecdotes are worth what you paid. Enjoy.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Honestly, you sound a but like me in the sense that you try new things or atleast try to understand them. That company will die from lack of innovators before you reach 30. Find another job that has an IT manager that has an open minded.
I'm about to have lunch with a 75 year old retired electrical engineer that sounds like you and is still keeping up with developments in a variety of fields.
I'd probably be in the same boat as you if I wasn't surrounded by scientists (right up to the general manager) that are interested in new things and not just following the Standard Operating Proceedure all day then clocking out.
Age has nothing to do with drive, stay eager and hungry for knowledge and you'll do fine. However, don't get ahead of yourself. The real test of good IT worker is knowing when you don't know something and being able to defer to people with more experience or knowledge. They could be younger or older. It appears that your co-workers are the 9-5 type, no drive to learn or improve. You will get these people everywhere and they have their place. If you have drive and aptitude, doing PC\user\helpdesk support will not hold your interest for long but someone has to do it. Often the 9-5'ers are more than happy to do the same thing over and over, day in and day out.
There's machines in my workplace that had windows98 loaded on them last year, which eventually needed my help due to the issue of drivers you highlighted above. Legacy software that won't run on anything else is the culprit. It's been in the process of being rewritten (in python instead of an old VB and portable accross more than one OS) for some years to avoid such a silly situation, but it's still an example of a sane reason to install an old OS. From the summary above it doesn't look like that's the reason or if it is the poster hasn't been told.
Another would be recycling of old XP licences, but I think that's a false economy.
X in this case is stupid and/or not motivated.
Y in this case is smart and/or motivated.
That's the issue the question is raising.
On the other hand, if you are in an environment which is below your "Peter Principle" level, you should try to find one which challenges you and improves your skill set.
Also, while it's important to have a strong sense of self, it's also important to be able to understand other people's points of view, if you wish to be successful in the work world, and are not that elite irreplaceable genius who is a pillar of the organization.
And obviously, yes, people should be willing to learn new things. Learning new things takes intelligence and actual effort. For everyone but the smart and motivated, this is not something they are keen to do.
I've worked in many shops, including my current place of employment where the 'old folks' (i.e. 40+) like myself (I'm 45) put as much or even more effort into learning new technologies. I'm so happy to have given up management to go back to my oringinal role in the field as an engineer. These days it's mostly networking and security I work on. We are constantly drinking from the 'firehose' as we call it in order to stay current and hopefully a step ahead of our competition. We are a fairly unique shop though. Around 50 employees yet we count Fortune 100 and even Fortune 10 companies as among our many clients. My fellow enginners are the smartest bunch of people I've worked with in my 20+ years in IT and we are all, regardless of age (ranges from 22ish to 50ish) constantly filling our heads with new info. That is one of the reasons we're so successful, and it's great fun. As a plus, the pay is about as good as when I was at my peak in my management days (the 'dark decade' as I refer to it.).
you need to verify it'll actually work under XP. Doing so requires an XP installation. If your hardware requirements dictate recent hardware, you need XP on new hardware.
If you want to claim Windows XP compatibility, you need to test on hardware made during the Windows XP era. If your hardware requirements more or less dictate hardware made during the Windows 7 era, then you don't need to claim Windows XP compatibility because Windows Vista or Windows 7 will come on almost all such machines.
And I dont think that is an age issue, Im 38 and I still learn as much as I can, but also I have the experience to know a lot of times what solution is better for diferent reasons. If I have to work 2 more hours because somebody took the wrong decision I will be mad.
The BIOS issue can look silly, but if I wont be able to fully automatize the installation of a hundred boxes those are bad news, I better go back to the provider than spending 2-5 minutes changing a BIOS option before installing on every one of them.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
I won't generalize about IT departments, but many admins I've worked with certainly seem to be. For instance, I've frequently found Windows installations where Domain Admins is granted merely to allow a user to bounce a particular service, or to a service that needs write access to a few particular registry keys, because "that's the vendor-supported solution." Whether this vendor "support" extends to compensation for the cost of downtime caused by said overprivileged users accidentally installing untested "recommended" updates and rebooting a production server in the course of bouncing said service, or when a bug in the service causes it to recursively delete an unintentionally large portion of said registry, is left as an exercise.
More generally, I've found that admins seem overenthusiastic about learning about new features that vendors claim "increase security" or "reduce TCO", but are comparatively uninterested in creatively using existing features to the same ends, even when the former amounts to a monstrously complicated (i.e., because it must supportably generalize to thousands of diverse installations, not because vendors are stupid) configuration interface for the latter.
As for age, I'd say that, if anything, the problem is worse with younger admins who seem more inclined to take vendor claims at face value and assume that anything they might possibly need to know is a Google search or, at worst, a support request, away, otherwise the product is, as you say, "defective." Older admins seem to at least accept that any given component is but a part of a unique environment, and that they, not vendors, are responsible for ensuring the various parts interoperate correctly, even in an ostensibly "homogeneous" environment like a "Windows shop."
XP is new technology? You may have more serious problems than you posed in your query. Otherwise, no offense, but nobody likes a smart arse and you may just be experiencing the bog standard resentment felt by disillusioned co-workers who couldn't be arsed to do the bare minimum. Very common in many work places and you can either accept that and learn to fit in (not recommended) or try to find an environment more suited to your energetic work ethic. That said, if the job is worth keeping in other ways it may be worth a bit of introspection to find ways of doing what you do that are less annoying to your fellows. Don't know the full story, but usually when someone makes himself out to be an awesome whizz-kid the truth is somewhat different. Working with people can be difficult. You may need to learn to deal with the personalities and you can't expect them to love your awesomeness just because you think they should. Good luck.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
..and then you're sick of it.
/etc/init.d, and then I just make a symbolic link to them from the rc5.d directory if I want them active in run level 5! I get it now!" So for a decadethat's how I handled scripts I wanted executed every time my system booted. Well then about a year back I go to install Fedora 15 on a new system, and discover they've deprecated the Sys V init.d and now use "systemd." WTF is systemd? systemctl wtf.service? Now I have to spend hours reading man pages just so I can freaking get my daemons configured the way I want them. I'm not "super excited to learn a new system!" I'm really annoyed because I have to spend hours relearning something I learned 15 years ago, understood completely, and really never wanted to have to bother with again. It'll happen to you, too.
1) First, dude, I get that your excited, but slow your roll. Just do your job and people will notice. You're not special. If you go around telling everybody how smart you are and how much you love "stuffing your cranium with knowledge," that usually means you're just insecure and want everybody else to think you're as great as you think you are. Rich people don't talk about money, because it's not a big deal to them. They already have it. People in America don't talk about how great it is that they're not starving and how well-fed they are because it's not a big deal to them. But starving fuckers in Africa? I bet they talk about food a lot. Smart people who like to learn things don't talk about it. They just go read another book.
2) They're not calling you "Google" because they think you're smart. They're mocking you, because the way you solve problems is to type the error message you get into google, and then cut and paste the solution somebody else figure out and published on a mailing list. There's nothing wrong with that. That's how I solve 95% of my tech problems, too. But I don't think my ability to google error messages means I'm a tech wizard.
3) It's not that your co-workers aren't interested in learning new things. It's just that they're not interested in learning how to solve problems they've already solved. Getting XP to install on a computer? They've been doing that for 10 years. When they encounter a machine that won't install, they're not excited to learn what's wrong, they're really pissed off they have to solve a problem that's been solved for 10 years.
The first time I "learned" Linux/UNIX 15 years ago, I was really excited. "Ohhhhhhhso scripts to start daemons when the system boots are in
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I know an environment exactly like the one you're describing. A HUGE enterprise with that setup.
* Do you have 150,000+ machines under management covering nearly all of the USA? (This is why they're still on XP btw, I sat in the meetings)
* Is it a large financial institution?
* Is the big boss (of the local group) of Israeli decent?
I too started in that group (at 20 years of age actually), though I'm no longer in it. If I'm spot on, let me know.
But dude, even if it's a different company, everyone here is right. You sound cocky. Way too cocky for what you think you know. A few points:
* They had to replace THOUSANDS of dollars worth of machinery? AYFKM? Do you realize most enterprises (esp the biggest ones) get their evaluation machinery for free? Even if they didn't, thousands of dollars ain't sh*t.
* Do you realize changing bios settings across 10s of thousands of machines will cost money?
* You're 22, your labor is cheap. Experienced IT engineers are not cheap. They know this and won't waste their time on errands that don't make the company money when they can just as easily switch to another manufacturer.
* There are literally dozens of manufacturers that would love to get into a company that will order machines by the thousands. If the manufacturer can't get the order right in the first place, it's usually more efficient to move to the next one.
I could go on but I won't. If you happen to work for the same department I once worked for and are looking for some advice, I'll give it to you because you appear to need it. I will give you some straight up advice (via work channels) and keep it between us if you want. I won't be rude, but I will be honest. There is A LOT of stuff you just don't understand dude. I figure I'll help a kid out as someone once did to me (in that same department with not too dissimilar situation) in my early 20s. Let me know.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
You have 4 types of people when it comes to computers.
You have the Alpha, the person who understand both hardware and software. This is the best type, sounds like it's you, and there isn't that many of us around.
Next time, is the Person who understands hardware, but not software.
And next, is the Person who understand software but not hardware.
And then, you have 75% off the rest, the people who don't understand shit about computers.
The problem is, most people don't understand shit about computers. You get the people that understand hardware, but do NOT understand software at all, and fuck up their computers OS all the time. You find these people usually working at places like best buy, or other places that sells computers or builds computers to sell.
Then you got the people who understand software but do NOT understand hardware. These are the most common computer users, next to the idiots that don't know shit about computers. These are the people who will call up tech support because their mouse stopped working, when it just probably became unplugged.
These sound like the people you work with, because while they couldn't get the software running, they didn't do any looking on the hardware to see if it was a setting problem.
And the rest i don't need to discuss, because you probably do tech support for them, because they are not only in your family, they live next to you also.
But dude, you sound like you are at the top of the heap and don't let everyone else's lack of knowledge bother you. They don't see computers like you do, they never will. You on the other hand, are going to be able to solve most the computer problems that get thrown at you, mainly if you keep on the path you are. When I first got my taste of computers back in the early 80's, I could NOT get enough of them. I spent most my high school years taking classes with access to computers, spending too many hours at the local Radio Shack (TRS-80's were my first computers).
Ya man, you keep doing what you are doing, and don't worry about everyone else being stupid, I think you are going to find that most the people you deal with are dumber then you are. Part of life.
Be seeing you...
You will find that it is more about the Office Politics than the technical ability. People who don't know ANYTHING but just rely on others will ahead further than you. You will learn that you need to play the game in making your boss look good, but not too good that they won't let you advance because they don't want to lose you, if you want to achieve advancement within the organisation you work for.
Yes, that's what they'll tell you, there are no after work beer meetings. But every office has them. If they tell you they don't exist, they just don't want to hurt your feelings.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Well stated.
You have NO FUCKING IDEA how primitive your "knowledge" is and how close you are to your co-workers. What you think, you know is a worthless set of tricks combined with advertisement of equally worthless "new technologies".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?
My workplace: about 55 I think.
I don't have the impression that they have difficulty accepting new technology - after all, we are producing bleeding edge technology ourselves - but with 25+ years under the belt, you really have seen it all before and mostly been unimpressed.
As for myself - my son is about your age, and he is just like you (and so was I once); that's good, too. But there are reasons why us old-timers have returned to the command line and use things like make directly. I used to be in love with Windows back when it was version 2; I lived and breathed DOS and BIOS. I have programmed for Windows 2, 3, NT, ... as well as OS/2, GNOME and KDE. I write Java EE applications and I even enjoy some of the music my son likes. So I don't think I am particularly reactionary - but I don't fall on my nose in worship as soon as I see yet another 'new' gimmick, 'cause I have seen it before, and it turned out to be crap. Trust me, you'll get there yourself.
Where I work as a teaching technology manager the average age (excluding three 22'ish students we employ as part time helpdesk phone support) is about 40. Due to streamlining (AKA downsizing AKA hacking the guts out of IT staff) all the lower (and younger) level staff were laid off as senior (non IT) management decided that with all the automation in deployment and basic systems management they were not needed.
Now we had the exact same "issue" as the OP talks about... but this was 3 years ago with our labs - new machines running XP... it took us (well me) about 10 minutes to resolve this - from first principals of fault diagnosis to workout it was some sort of "firmware" issue, discover that the BIOS had UEFI enabled, remember an article I read some months back and 30 seconds of googling to find a site with similar information. we resolved the situation faster than you could say "Useless old codgers".
Last year we were assigned management of a lab that was still running an antique XP image with a very old version (6?) of Internet explorer. after remotely updating and patching the lab we almost immediately had some young programer (maybe 25 and only 4 years out of his ComSci degree) on the phone blasting us because all the teaching delivery software he wrote (including some new stuff he was just testing when we updated the lab) wouldn't run under later versions of IE.
it's not so much a case of old dogs not learning new tricks but you find that a lot of people (some "old" but many not much out of their ComSciDegree) not bothering to adapt to new technologies and resources. No doubt I could have lived out my working days programming in COBOL and CICS ending up winding down to retirement in some Banking/Government legacy support consultancy roll (actually that wouldn't have been bad financially - they earn good money) But screw that, that's not why I got interested in IT in the first place.
As a 40ish year old technical engineer I can tell you that I spend less time chasing ideal solutions and much less time believing marketing hype. You assume that your co-workers don't want to learn new technology but you've skipped the entire story about the requirements for the deployment.
My advice to keep you employed is to find a mentor, one of them you get along with well and go to them with these questions. Hey Bill, can I ask why we chose to use XP for these PC's rather than something more current? For all you know it's a business policy that all PC's deployed this year use XP until the company cuts over to 7. Pissing off people high enough to fire you with off handed comments about technology is a good way to get fired but there is nothing wrong with people knowing that you are a fan of xyz technology.
Successful non-technical businesses do not upgrade because it's a possibility, they upgrade when doing so makes them money or they can no longer buy support for what they already have. Your job as a tech or engineer is to learn the new stuff as you can so you are ready to support it when eventually they switch but don't bother recommending upgrading until you can justify the cost in savings. Dollars is what the real world is about, not just running the latest software.
As far as the age thing goes, some people have a passion for technology, some people don't. As someone who does many technical interviews both right out of college and also people switching technologies I can tell you that age is a poor indication of how good of a engineer they turn out to be. Passion, interest count for more. There are college graduates that will obviously go far and some that will just sit around and facebook all day. Older engineers have the same differences.
tl;dr: Been there, done that. Learn to come up with business cases for choosing new technology when appropriate and businesses will almost always follow the savings.
Here we go, now you have an interesting new wrinkle. Dilbert and the De-Motivator posters are funny for a reason. At 22, you and others like you are coming to the game white hot and exploding with energy. But if people end up in a couple different companies with culture problems, eventually an under-paid salary creeps up on you.
I read through most of the comments and here's a different slant on things. I'm modestly clever at those kinds of "low level fixes" that get Today's Problem solved, but a long time ago I decided I didn't want to be a raw IT worker. So I went the business route and then used my secondary IT knowledge like a satellite help desk in the main office where those kinds of quick fixes became very useful.
As I got older, tech itself did become less interesting, and I'm glad I have a second angle. You might find interesting things about yourself if you sat down one day and said "what *second* profession do I want to be good at?" If the answer is "nothing", there's one warning sign. And if you do find one, you might find your energy to learn every last detail on the tech side slipping! : )
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's the first thing I wondered. Until I got my current job with a software company, I was around the same type of IT people. The big difference was that the IT department in my other companies was seen as a necessary expense in order to keep everything running. This tends to shape the attitudes of IT folks, who only get yelled at when stuff doesn't work but who otherwise are relatively invisible. The IT department in my current company absolutely must work in concern with developers, customer support, and executives because our infrastructure simply must support a complex, secure, and ever-changing environment.
Some of the wisdom that you will probably gain if you stick with it is that change in any IT infrastructure is absolutely frightening, be it hardware or software. Veterans understand that each and every piece of hardware and software is tweaked to meet the business requirements of your company, and any small change to anything can bring the whole thing down. Even an OEM-recommended upgrade to a server that has been tested thoroughly can have unexpected and disastrous results. An enterprise level OS upgrade is "nontrivial" and, if your system was already working with XP and there was no compelling reason to upgrade, their attitude is completely understandable.
As you learn how to coexist more peacefully with your IT co-workers, you will notice that everyone has specialized knowledge that everyone else relies on and respects. It is that specialized knowledge that makes them good co-workers. If you respect that and understand that--like you-- they are just doing their jobs, you will understand that the "pat on the back" you seem to desire will come in the form of their mutual respect.
Lastly, as someone you would consider an "older" co-worker, I would say that the any new workers who don't know The System have the potential to be relatively dangerous. They landed their respective jobs because they have lots of knowledge, but don't know enough about The System to understand why things are the way they are. So if you feel coddled or treated in some way that makes you feel under appreciated, I'm guessing it is because you haven't made any impression otherwise yet. You were just doing your job.
All you have to do is demonstrate to the "old ones" how your "new and improved" system will benefit them and their offspring and they will eagerly accept updated technology. Unfortunately today, most "new and improved" translates into "fleece them shearer to increase my coffers faster".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The real problem here is one that I see often in all ages of support people. There is a bias towards being blind to the possibility that, in fact, they themselves are doing something wrong. "The computer is broken since I can't make it work" - in this specific case, they were pushing new hardware backwards to support Windows XP (which they really do need to get off of now, for a wide number of security reasons), but were assuming that nothing had changed with the new hardware...
Instead of "tweaking the bios," why didn't you convince someone to let you put VMWare ESXi on a server somewhere, and run XP there via the vCenter client? Or put Virtual Box on everyone's system where necessary to run the legacy XP? Another alternative would be to cobble yourself up some Windows Server instances on Amazon and accomplish what you were trying to do from there, VPNing into your local network if necessary to get to any floating licenses your company needed.
Dang inexperienced kids. Now a 54 year old guy like me would have known all that. :)
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I admire your enthusiasm, try not to lose that quality and you could get far in life.
Here are a few advice I have, take them for what they're worth:
- Choose your battles wisely. The bigger the company, the more chances there is to have someone with more power than you that will be intimidated by your results. The actions they take can be surprising.
- Be certain to always take care of your primary responsibilities first before taking others.
- Only get involved in other responsibilities if you can have a reasonable impact without burning yourself out.
- When getting involved in other projects, like in your example, make sure your help is welcomed. And when it isn't, try to free yourself mentally of the success or failure of the project.
- In situations such as the example you wrote, try not to take the credit for the solution yourself, try to make it look like the solution came from them and give them the opportunity to give you credit if they wish. It will have a better value and a bigger impact coming from your colleagues.
You are going to find two types of techs throughout your career.
* The Career-Person:
Is there to punch a time card and collect a paycheck
Learns only what is necessary to do the job
Probably received a classroom education on tech
Goes home and complains about not having enough free time to socialize
* The Enthusiast:
Loves technology and loves getting paid for working with it
Is constantly researching new technology even if it doesn't have to do with work
Could either have a degree our self taught education
Goes home and hacks on/fiddles with some sort of tech
Writing software(GNU) != Selling software(Microsoft) != Selling support(RedHat) != Selling solutions(IBM) != Selling gadgets(Apple) != Selling advertisements(Google) != Selling consulting(Accenture) != Body shopping(TCS/Infosys/Wipro)
Casteism
Sounds to me like the others had their reasons for not liking the boxes, and the trouble with the XP install was just a convenient excuse to dump them, til Smartass McGee came along and "fixed" things for them. Now they're stuck with the shit boxes they really should have returned for something better.
I have noticed over the years that I tend to have a special knack for finding answers to software development issues via Google. My team can be on a conference call and somebody brings up an issue they are struggling with and I am usually the one on the call who comes up with an answer first. Don't laugh - knowing what terms to search for and where to put quotes around phrases to bring the most relevant answers to the top is a very useful skill that has served me well.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
I hope, though unnecessarily, given the evidence, clearly visible as it is, that you're also one of among the worstest writers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've been the 'young buck' in IT at every job I've had, but I'm starting to get a bit older now. I'm actually the guy who builds images for a university. What you have is important, but an IT department can't just be filled with young folks. I rely on the same kind of people you work with to *actually deploy the work* that I do, and fix the computers when they break, and file tickets when my stuff has bugs in it. It's frustrating having to deal with people who are always working around bugs or limitations that no longer exist, but I can't take on all the responsibility myself.
What I would suggest in your situation is to ask your manager or their manager to give you some time to build newer images, using the tools Microsoft gives people like us to work with modern hardware. Make it a project to modernize imagine deployment. Learn some Powershell so you can write some kick-ass 'firstrun' and management scripts. Investigate how to do things like app virtualization, user data redirection, and remote BIOS management that will make things better for everyone. And most of all, DOCUMENT the processes for the old-timers so they're able to do the things that you figure out.
If you want, you can contact me off-list and I can help you get started with Windows Imaging and some handy scripts we use.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I have exactly the same problem!! I am more in software than support or system build though but there are so many times when I suggest some new technique or pattern that the rest of the team just discard and ignore because they just don't seem to care. Just the other day I was asked to put together a web service using SOAP. I came right back and said we should use JASON because SOAP is so five minutes ago and is both more compact and flexible and they said something about SOAP being a more resilient protocol and I just laughed because they just don't understand and cant be bothered to grok a new protocol. There's one big difference between us though - I'm 52 and have been programming for 35 years.
"we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7"
There's your problem, time was and the software vendors had to make sure their software ran on the hardware not other-way-round.
AccountKiller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book)
It sounds like xTrashCat is probably a Growth Mindset individual relative to his profession. Most folks are Fixed Mindset relative to their profession, which is sad really. Even more sad, corporate hierarchies are usually built by implicitly rewarding Fixed Mindset behaviors. So, if you want to get really good at your profession, you either have to give up management aspirations (in most companies), or you have to find a company (or start one) that, through something akin to the founder effect, developed a culture that highly values and rewards growth mindset thinking. Having been in this field for close to 20 years now, I'll say good luck to you, because I've only worked for growth-mindset folks for a single 5 year span.... it was the best time of my career so far... but it's fleeting.
I can tell you that when I was working for a growth-mindset oriented company, one thing that was very different was how management behaved. Management was almost scared of the engineering folks -- they considered their role to be "obstacle removers", and they knew that they were going to be judged during performance appraisal time by the BOTTOM of the pyramid (they had an upside down hierarchy -- you as an individual were judged not by your boss, but by a collection of your customers -- your boss just did the paperwork, and sort of coached you on how to relate to your customers better). It was weird compared to the other 15 years of my career so far, but I must say, it was amazing how much we got done.... highly collaborative... highly passionate... highly motivating... a little stressful sometimes I guess.... but I'd go back in a heartbeat if I could. I used to have dreams about code back then -- I'd wake up in the middle of the night and try to scribble down notes for an algorithm or something we were stuck on. I learned more in that 5 years than I've learned in the other 15. Every day was like an adventure, and I couldn't wait to get to work, believe it or not.
In the mean time xTrashCat, you can try to encourage growth-mindset behaviors by using small rewards when someone makes an effort (regardless of whether they actually accomplish anything -- you want the risk taking behavior to increase, you don't really care about the outcome at this point). As a junior engineer, you only have informal relational authority, so you have to be creative -- you need to transition from "that young punk who thinks he knows everything" to "that young guy who is so excited all the time that I'm excited to be working with him, and I like the funny little things he does to encourage us to try stuff". If you can make that transition, there's a chance that you can "bloom where you're planted" and create a little bubble of growth-mindset folks to work with... which is the best I've been able to achieve in any kind of sustained manner.
This sounds not so much like a knowledge issue, and more like some "techs" who have poor problem-solving skills and go by the book for their "troubleshooting".
No, it sounds more like a case of assholes making ASSumptions.
I'm 53, I use bleeding edge technology all the time. So do lots of people older than me.
How would it be if - just for example - somebody posted a story about an African American having trouble with new software? Would everybody assume, from that story, that African Americans were incapable of working with new software? What if such a story were posted about women?
How are stories, like this, any different from any other sort of bigotry?
- One Windows admin is now so sick of technology he has BANNED computers and laptops from his house. His poor college-age daughter isn't even allowed to bring her laptop home with her (it has to stay in the car). If you ask for his technical wisdom/incite/knowledge/ect it had _better_ be on-the-clock or you are going to get griped at.
- Another refuses to debug hardware. Claims that it isn't worth his time to fix the computer. He spends THOUSANDS buying new computers and parts. Management doesn't like it, but wont do anything about it because he has been there almost 30 years. A few years ago I got a 7 month old quad-processor dual core server rack for my project because 'crashes all the time', 'isn't worth the time to fix', and 'wasted too much time already'. This was a $12K system when they bought it. I spent ~5 minutes hooking it up and started memtest only for it to fail near instantly. Spent thirty minutes going through the sticks of memory one at a time till I found the one generating the problems. Let memtest run over night and no other problems. That system has been running in production since then (I also took the 20 minutes to RMA the memory). I can't tell you how much equipment I have reintroduced into production use that he was sending to the dumpster. NEW equipment or close to it (even i don't care to work on the 1.4Ghz P4). I never spend much time fixing these problems either.
- Another guy has a similar issues but much more frustrating in my opinion. He _refuses_ to buy _anything_ that doesn't have a support contract on it. No hardware and certainly no software (meaning he won't touch any of my FOSS projects even if his life counted on it). If something 'breaks' he is on the phone with someone for them to fix it. If something goes out of support contract time he either renews it or gets rid of it. He isn't so much an IT admin as he is an over paid babysitter. The company could replace him with a 15 year old at minimum wage and accomplish the same results. Unfortunately I know several people with this attitude. It is one thing to have a good support contract when things get over your head, it is another thing to call a company because "a yellow light on the hard drive came on and they should come out and fix it" or calling microsoft because his computer blue screened once and they should look at the logs and fix it (I wish those were jokes or exaggerations).
- The last guy that I will mention really pisses me off. Had a big new project coming down the pike. He wanted to do it in an old and inefficient method. I knew I could do better. I did my research and due diligence. Had a presentation of results comparing multiple products and everything showing why my solution was the best choice. Everyone was on-board including several layers of management upwards except him. Next day I come in and find out that my plan had been shot down. I asked way and kept pestering until I was called in with him and the manager in charge of the project. After some effort trying to get an answer even the manager wanted to know why he pulled strings on this. We finally got him to open up. Turns out my solution required us to run on Linux and he was a Windows guy. I quote "I have less then 5 years till retirement and I will be DAMNED if I have to learn a new operating system." Turns out this was also why he was so aga
Yes, some of the old-hats are incapable of learning new tricks. The ones who could moved on to better pastures and the ones who couldn't... well, they're the senior tech guys now, old and wise and stuck in the '90/'80/'70s.
Just keep on learning, try not to piss off the connected old dogs and move on to better opportunities when the chance arrives.
I've found that IT teams senior-heavy are very VERY resistant to fancy new tech (windows 7!? It was better when we had to adjust the potentiometers on disk drives with a torque wrench and oscilloscope! Multicore and virtualization are stupid, just another fad like zip disks! Besides, we already moved away from mainframes! What's a blue ray?).
You've got time and money to devote to learning; they have blue pills, kids, retirement savings and cribbage at the legion that demand attention.
You and I will be there one day too.
How much work could a network work if a network could net work?
"My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes."
Watch your back.
Remember, always show humility in front of your superiors. (Then slag them off in front of their superiors...)
Hi, I'm 61 and I hope I never stop learning. I went to a VMware class and virtualized most of our servers then got in a motorcycle accident. Took me 6 moths to get back to work but they saved my job. We're now into VDI. I like new tech. I rooted my Android phone and Gtab tablet. Don't know if this goes for others but I'm eager to take on new technology.
The situation presented by the OP is not really age related. It has a lot more to do with attitude and personality. I work in IT and turned 50 a couple weeks ago. I spend a significant amount of my time trying to keep up with technology advancements. Most of the people I work with and know that work with technology do not try to keep up with things unless they must to do their job. It really comes down to a matter of interest. Some people have an innate interest in technology and learning as much as they can about it. Others do not. What you do for a living really has little to do with it.
I don't know why this was modded down; it's damn good advice.
Because it's the truth, and our species has a nasty habit of punishing those who possess the hojo's to point it out.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I had a very similar experience when I started working in desktop support at age 20 (now age 30 and am a system administrator for an 80 person company). I was very eager to prove myself and ran circles around the people I worked with. I digitized our support documents, setup a common share for our programs, showed them how to use images for computers to speed up deployment, etc. (Large company with more than 40 distribution centers all over the country) Unfortunately, IT was not what made the company money, I also lacked a college degree which kept me from going into the management training program they had. What I have been slowly learning is that many large companies don't care about wasting money or having inefficient processes. They seem to make most of their money other ways than being very efficient or focus on being efficient in certain areas that drive their business. What you want to look for is a company where IT is the driving force for making money or is a close second. This is also why you will find people who are not very good at what they do in these departments. People who are really good will figure out how to get higher up or have entered a field of work that pays a lot better than support to start with. Watching them drop $40K on a couple servers or a piece of software they don't need for budget reasons and end up not using is hard to deal with. You think about how much money you could save them if they focused more but they don't care because if they save that money, it doesn't go in your or their pocket. Smaller companies can sometimes value these type of savings more. Working for any company, especially a very large one is also very political. Relationships are very important and someone high up liking you will get you further faster than anything else. The other folks who value good support are small businesses 1-25 people that don't have enough work or money for a full time support person. Starting and running a small business support company can be very time consuming from family, doesn't have very good benefits, but could pay off in the future if you don't burn out before you get a good general manager in place to handle running things so you can go on vacation in peace. This is the gist of what I have learned after 10 years in the working world and I am still trying to figure out how everything works.
Everyone in IT starts out with a spring in their step. I'm 31 and have been in corporate IT since I was 18, and I can tell you I am a fair bit more likely to return something in favor of a simpler product or farm stuff out to vendors than I was even 5 years ago. I used to spend 2-3 hours every evening doing work from home because I found I could get a lot of things accomplished due to the reduced distractions, but there comes a time in everyone's life when they no longer enjoy having to juggle 10-20 projects at any given time, and want to be able to go home at a decent hour and spend time with their family. So...short answer, the guys you work with were probably just like you at one point, and on one hand they should be keeping up with the new developments in technology, but on the other hand the shine their job once had has worn off and they just want to get things done without having to put extra effort in.