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CIOs Say New Talent and Old Tech Don't Mix
StewBeans writes: Usually when an article references "what keeps IT leaders up at night," it's a chance to talk about "shadow IT," losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that "reports of pain are greatly exaggerated." IT leaders don't mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent. Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG's recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult. He says, "They worry that they can't move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn't want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
...old talent doesn't understand the new stuff."
I have never understood that. Some people seem to reach a point in their professional lives where they stop bothering to learn new stuff and just expect to allowed to vegetate away in their jobs for the last 15-20 years until retirement. I've been coding since around the time than many of the younger developers I work with were still a twinkle in their father's eyes and I still manage to keep up with new developments.
People get tired and life's responsibilities get in the way, especially when they have kids. I love learning so I also manage to find the time but I do understand why people get this way.
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again. Or tired of the ever growing bloat required to implement the same old thing you already had 10 years ago under a different name.
Okay, I'll admit right off that I'm an old dude. I'm the oldest one in my group, but the rest of the group is roughly in the 35-45 range so they're not particularly young (from the perspective of this story).
Anecdotes are dangerous, but... with my coworkers, I rarely see any evidence that they don't "understand the new stuff". What is true, though, is they sometimes don't understand the appeal of the new stuff, nor why anyone would consider using it. After all, when it comes down to it most new approaches don't really accomplish anything that the "old way" cannot... at least from the perspective of an IT professional. But I think what they sometimes miss is that new ways of doing things sometimes actually might be more user-friendly for a particular set of end users - and there is value in that.
Why bother with ruby when perl has served us so well for so long? Or, further afield, why consider Wordpress when we already have wikis - or why not just keep maintaining a website with a text editor as your only tool? Sometimes I think it helps an IT person if they can learn to set aside their technical hat for a while, and try to see it from the other person's eyes.
#DeleteChrome
This is what tires me the most. I've been through revisions of systems, and usually despite the marketing hype that sells the new systems they end up being used much like the old systems that replaced them. I won't deny that sometimes IT people drag their feet about upgrading when it really truly is time to upgrade, but there are far more times when someone that doesn't directly understand the technology makes a decision to make the change when it is change simply for its own sake. I guess I'm a borderline-cynic, but I want to see a demonstration of improvement before it's widely implemented.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Old Talent: Any legal resident or citizen who makes more then $15/hour, has relevant work experience, a proven track record and knows what they are doing; i.e. someone management wants to lay off as soon as possible.
The old talent doesn't want to do the new stuff: Management would kill their families and pets with a straight razor while they sleep, butcher their bodies, cook the meat into tacos, then serve the tacos to the Sunday school kindergarten class before they would be willing to train anyone for anything ever.
Why is Snark Required?
You got by 30+ years doing the job you liked, but they also failed to think ahead and hoped to ride out the lifespan of the technology with the lifespan of their careers.
The "old" system offered people retirement and pension after 20 years, meaning many people could "retire" around age 40 with a modest pension. Not quite enough to live on, but definitely enough to support a dramatic change of career. And you could retire from your second career around age 60.
Turns out, a lot of people get bored, frustrated, or otherwise useless at their job in their 40s. Call it the mid-life crisis, if you like. Failure to adapt, if you like. It can be pretty useful to both the employee and the employer to have people change careers at that point, but it's pretty intimidating to do that if all you've got is a 401k that you're not allowed to touch until you're 59
That's utterly full of generalizations and bullshit, which is typical. This whole debate is framed as 'young people don't want to' and 'old people can't', as if the young people could do anything if they just wanted to. Newsflash: They can't. I have an older person right now cleaning up an unbelievable mess that two younger people made because they didn't know what they were doing, and the people managing them didn't catch it because they assumed young people are always talented and get everything.
Know what else young people are terrible at? Recognizing when anything that already exists has value. That's why they waste energy, money, resources, etc. constantly reinventing the wheel and shouting to the world how great they are at it, while expecting to be a founder of a wildly successful startup because they have a decades old process a crappy UI that runs on a smartphone. The narcissism is unbelievable. That mega mainframe you speak derisively of had transactional and security capabilities that these cloud idiots are still trying to re-invent, and using them didn't require stitching together code in 4 languages with 100 libraries that all suck and which some alleged genius will reinvent next week anyway. Hell, even stuff 'in the cloud' is, in the vast majority of actual use cases, just a re-invention of timesharing systems, and there's a reason we got away from those too. (No, I am not nor have I been a mainframe developer. Worked with enough of them though...I use the tech I was just insulting so it comes honestly)
Do people get to where they haven't kept up with some things? Yep. Mostly that happens because you have a portfolio of things to keep running because that's your job. The notion of doing things you're good at may seem alien to people who allow themselves to be abused by 80 hour work weeks, but (having missed it myself) I think things worked better for actual human beings when it was that way.
When you're 20 and have nothing it's easier to experiment. That's normal. The other thing people with experience are saddled with is that business people suck at planning, and pretty much everything else. They never say 'we want to go in this direction so you guys should learn this'. Instead, they let existing systems be and then scramble to replace them with no warning. In that case, it doesn't even matter if you keep up with (alleged) advances in tech, you'd have to have randomly guessed which piece of tech the business people are going to throw at you this time because it's not like they ever ask anybody what will fit in with what they already use.
Of course, business people also don't like older tech people because they have a nasty habit of pointing out stupid ideas. There's a fine line between digging in and making something work and knowing when you shouldn't do that.
Have I met young talent with a clue? Of course I have. Older people who you just can't get to try anything? Yep. This stereotyping has to stop. We in tech need to stop fighting with each other over it.
The real problem is business owners and managers who have no idea how to evaluate talent and fall back on generalizations to cover up their own inadequacy.
They probably just get sick of seeing the same mistakes implemented over and over again.
Or they're just sick of being asked to jump from one fad to another. A lot of times, the "new stuff" is the same old stuff with a new coat of paint and a bunch of flashy buzzwords. There was a recent story on Slashdot about the amazing new concept of "DevOps", and the only explanation I could get for what it was is, "Have developers work with operations." Wow. Big move there. You mean you don't want different departments within your business at each other's throats? You want them to work together seamlessly?
And I'm sick of programmers going on endlessly about how their brilliant new organizational and project management style will fix everything. "Agile" this and "waterfall" that. Oh, instead of having your project be one single big project, you're going to break your project into smaller projects? You've designed a new theme for your gantt chart? Slap a buzzword on it, and you have the hot new development method that's going to solve world hunger!
"Oh, you're on Friendster? That's lame, I'm on MySpace. Oh, you're on MySpace? That's lame, I'm on Facebook. Oh, you're on Facebook? That's lame, I only use Snapchat now." What are you doing with your lives. Whatever network you're on, you're just sending out pictures that nobody wants to look at.
This is why old people don't care. Young people see the hot new thing and think, "This is going to be the thing that changes the world and makes everything great!" Old people have been through that several times, and think, "This is another one of those things that's supposed to change the world and make everything great. Same as the last 50 things that were supposed to do that. And this one looks even stupider."