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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.
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).
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.
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......
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.
"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
[...] if you have to touch *every* box to make a change, that's a significant time sink and not a good use of personnel. [...] if the boxes you guys ordered don't work with the setup you want to use, something went wrong.
This is the important part.
It's good that you figured out what was wrong so quickly. Now, which is cheaper for the company: Having you go through 30 boxes today and however many boxes tomorrow and change the settings before they can be imaged with XP or return the 100 boxes to the vendor and have them change them? That depends on the situation--will those machines, in general, be running XP or is it just this lab? Will Windows 7 boot in legacy mode? Which is the best way to go so we don't have to configure each machine we send out separately, which takes valuable and expensive personnel time?
Fun example: My roomate works for a company that makes fishing reels. They have a policy that they will repair issues with their reels for the life of the reel--send in the reel that's dirty and broken and they will fix it or send you a new one. She briefly worked fixing reels, something she really enjoyed. She loved disassembling it and figuring out what was wrong, fixing the problem, reassembling the reel and making it work like new. She was a dedicated worker, coming in and working hard all day fixing reels.
The problem was that when a reel came in, she would set about fixing it. Sometimes she would take the entire day to do so. So the company, paying her $12/hr, spent $96 to repair a reel which cost $50. Sure, the cost in parts to the company was cheap: a penny screw or rubber washer or something like that. Meanwhile, only one reel was fixed that day and there were 9 more waiting to be fixed.
She would complain about her "lazy" co-workers who would "fix" five reels in a day by guessing that fixing it "would be too much work" and would just order them a new one. She would complain about her boss that was on her case about fixing more reels in a day--didn't they understand that tearing these things down and putting them back together took time?! Even when they explained it to her that she was costing the company more money by doing what she was doing, she just couldn't seem to understand that it was sometimes cheaper to send them a new one than to fix the old one and the ability to estimate how much time it would take to fix the reel was an important skill.
Eventually, the company moved her out of fixing reels and put her in a different position where she has excelled.
So the point is that figuring out what was wrong is a good thing. But, in the bigger picture, it might have been more cost-effective for the company to return the computers and get ones that were correctly configured for their needs than paying someone to reconfigure the machines themselves.
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/