Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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 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!
Old age is a protected status in the US.
FTFY.
As someone who has, many times, been told I was turned down for a position because I was "just too young," I can promise you that people under 65 enjoy no such protection.
FTR, I'm still under 30.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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...
As someone who has, many times, been told I was turned down for a position because I was "just too young," I can promise you that people under 65 enjoy no such protection.
FTR, I'm still under 30.
That means you lack experience, not that you're too young.
Now go refill this coffee. No cream, no sugar.
This space for rent.
There are idiots in every profession, certainly. However, in IT, and this may be just my perception because of my familiarity with the industry, they seem to coagulate in certain locations much more than any other industry.
Possibly the good ones, especially the ones with the rational type "anti-idiocy" personality types, quit and move on when they've got to deal with idiots on a daily basis, so the business hires someone to replace him. This continues until the business' IT dept is staffed by nothing but idiots.
In short, xTrashcat shouldn't plan on getting too comfortable in this job, because dealing with this style of coworker continually might just drive him off the deep end.
The fact that they were trying a standard, existing image on entirely new hardware tells me that they're not paddling with all oars to begin with. This is usually a recipe for a BSOD, and even if you can get it working, you've got a bunch of old driver cruft, which slows down the machine.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect".
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The thing that xTrashcat is missing is the contrary point of view:
Dear Slashdot,
Where I work, I'm the only one with a decade of experience under my belt. My coworkers constantly advocate using the newest, hippest tech without any concern for how well it's been proven to work. Our production environment constantly crashes and we've had many nights where we've had to pour over core dumps to figure out what's going wrong. The developers that work on these projects have been friendly, but ultimately unable to produce a stable product. How do I get my coworkers to realize that if we step back from the bleeding edge, we'll end up getting cut a lot less often?
There's two sides to the story. As xTrashcat gets older, he'll realize that learning is great, but so is sleeping through the night. There's a balance to be struck between using cool new technology and using tried-and-true, proven technology. At 22, he doesn't have the experience yet to see the wisdom of the latter path. He seems to be working with a group of people who are all to old, jaded and unwilling to learn to see the virtue in the former path. He should either a) try to learn from the wisdom of his coworkers without losing his zeal for learning (could be hard and frustrating) or b) go work with a bunch of other 20-somethings and learn those same lessons the hard way. This will be more work, less frustrating and result in earning less money.
There are other industries that still make heavy use of 232 and 485. I used to work in security monitoring, access control and fire alarm and control. There is a metric butt ton of 232 and 485 cable in the world that runs all that stuff. Alarm monitoring and (especially) fire monitoring/control care about one thing and one thing only : It has to be reliable... not sexy... not new... reliable or people burn to death.
"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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
It's also fundamentally easier to work long hours when you are younger. The added flexibility makes it possible to try the bleeding edge. With fewer hours, the older must be more conservative with their choices. Both can be leveraged positively by a sufficiently wise organizational structure, but usually aren't.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
Yes, but what was it you poured over the core dumps?
http://www.glasswings.com/
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.
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.
Dunning and Kruger rated themselves way too high.
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.
Lots of people. But, notably given the context, not me.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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 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."
- 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?
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.