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Older Workers Are Better At Adapting To New Technology, Study Finds (cio.com)
"Don't let the millennial buzz fool you. Older workers handle and adapt to new systems better than younger people," writes CIO magazine. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: A survey by London-based market research firm Ipsos Mori, sponsored by Dropbox, found that older workers are less likely to find using technology in the workplace stressful and experience less trouble working with multiple devices than the younger cohort.
Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff." Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff." Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
She's very proficient at deleting emails.
I think it's funny that in the original submission, ITWBennett messed up the URL for the survey.
The twenty year-olds haven't had to learn new technologies and adapt. Ever manage a group of developers under thirty? I have nearly sixty under me, and I think only a couple of them are good at learning new things.
Any "interpretation" of the results is coming from some high-up blowhard at Dropbox, who likely pulled it from his nether regions.
My experience has been that some people are more adaptable than others, and that spans generational lines. But younger people are less likely to have a mental block simply because some new task just happens to involve a computer.
#DeleteChrome
My dad's generation had computers, telephones, and lots more that previous generations didn't - he bought our ZX Spectrum for us.
However, my grandfather was baffled by car seatbelts, anything no wired to a wall, and changing the channel on the television
It's no surprise now that, compared to twenty years ago, the older generations are better with technology. It's not their father's generation, who struggled to keep up, they grew up with all this stuff.
As we go on, the next generation are growing up being taught on iPads, with Kindles in libraries (what are those places?!), mobile phones from the day they are old enough. They won't have trouble adapting.
I call it the "old-people's home" fallacy. My grandmother would have been quite happy playing bingo for the rest of her existence once she retired. But I'm going to need a full-on Internet connection, a bunch of freedom and technology, to operate into my old age. There's no way I'm going to end up in a corner, dribbling, and watching Match of the Day, and it's not even a personality thing.
But are old-people's homes of today actually taking account of that? Not that I've seen. There are 60, 70, 80 years olds out there that are tech literate, can shop online, watch iPlayer, and all the other stuff we younger people do, because they were pioneers and that's stayed with them into old age and now they are the ones being put into homes that still cater only for a previous generation.
Time's change. I have no idea about allotment gardening or crochet or mending mechanical machines. Previous generations did but can't operate a mobile phone. As we go further on, the newer generations will be VR-addicts or whatever and they'll be surveys saying that not enough old people are getting the benefits of VR-space and still cling to their old WWW ways.
My mother can't use a universal remote that can control both the TV and cable box.
Nope.
Young workers are cheaper and will work longer hours.
Outsourced workers will work similar hours but they'll be A LOT cheaper.
H1-Bs will be cheaper and will work the most hours of all.
Old workers can give you the highest quality of work vs the above three (on average). But the bean counters don't really care about that. They want someone at their beckon call and want to pay as little as possible. If you aren't the resident expert and the company would implode without you, then you will be replaced soon enough.
This is also ignoring the ageism/racism that goes into socializing; companies with a bunch of young workers will tend to keep all their employees young. Also, companies that tend to have a majority of one race will tend to keep it that way.
But the young are cheaper and easily blackmailed so tough shit, old farts.
It says the old people are less likely to complain, and are happy to put up with shit.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Don't worry. It was only a plagiarized copy of your immigration visa.
They are probably less likely to adapt well to change for the sake of change when a perfectly decent working system is already in place. Which is likely where most of the problem with the whole "Older workers can't adapt to change" shtick comes from.
The freaking kiddies that think they know everything..
They cant fax anything to save their life.
They dont know how to use their voicemail..
They are confused by the copy machine.
Us old farts, we have EXPERIENCE and we can adapt to new stuff faster. Stuff it in your eye sockets you little snot nosed punks.
There is a reason why I just landed a job kicking out all the kiddies with fresh degrees with my 20 years of experience. I adapt faster and easier because nothing "new" is really actually new. It's a rehash of an older thing passed off as new. Your shiny new chat systems like SLACK? It's basically a copy of an IRC channel, not new technology in any way.
Texting and instant messaging? Kiddies, I was doing BBS messaging before your mother was old enough to breed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
After you've worked with old slow quirky bad tech like MSDOS or AT&T's Merlin phones, you know you can handle anything. Fact is, most of today's apps and tech services are freemium, so any company with a novel product that has to grab mindshare by virtue of its popular appeal knows they can't ship crap like what passed for software, O/S, or hardware back in the 1980â(TM)s. The youngsters have been spoiled, and it's only in the workplace where employers buy trash tools from the lowest bidder that staff must learn to make the best with busted tools (like SAP or Webex or Microsoft's webapps).
Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
What the heck is that supposed to mean. How many devices were they using? What were the nature of the complaints? How picky were they being? Did they control for the sophistication level of the devices in question?
I have 18 devices in my house last I counted with an IP address (computers, phones, tivo, tv, roku, thermostat, print server, webcam, etc). Folks in my dad's generation might have 2-4. (probably just phone and computer) Who do you think is going to complain about more devices? Who do you think it going to get the tech support call when something goes wrong? (hint, it's probably the guy with more devices)
I'm constantly shocked by younger people (30) who can't do anything that doesn't involve swiping on gadgets. Most of the 30 people at our company cannot do basic tasks in Windows.
I don't respond to AC's.
First is the data: older workers are better at adapting to new technology.
Second is the guesswork: "Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff."
"one Dropbox executive"...
Never spent a second thinking that it might be that older workers are more patient. Or older workers are more focused. I wouldn't be surprised if older workers could also do a better job than "one Dropbox executive".
You are welcome on my lawn.
We were better than our parents, who couldn't fix the flashing 12:00 on the VCR. Our cohort (plus those within 10 years of our age range) went from dealing with BASIC on Apple II, ZX Spectrum, QuickBasic, etc., DOS, earlier versions of UNIX, all the Windows-es, etc. all the way to the abomination that is Windows 8.
To play Doom, I had to download 6 ZIP files over a 2400 baud modem for a week, unpack everything, and learn how to hack the Config.sys file on my 4 MB DOS machine to free up just the right amount of the right type of memory.
When I bought my first scanner, it took 2 days of resolving IRQ conflicts by flipping DIP switches whose meanings I did not understand at the time to make sure it didn't conflict with my sound card.
Mice required their own drivers.
The current generation is just as smart as we are, if not more so. But they always had UIs that made sense. They did not live through an entire 2 decade long information technology revolution. It shouldn't come as a surprise that they are surprised by alien (and to them, non-sensical and inconsistent) interfaces developed for a captive audience.
Add to this that enterprise software is always purchased during golf games by people who will never use it, and you have a world in which our skills of adapting to horrible and inconsistent interfaces are still useful.
I will now press Alt-H to disconnect :)
I'm slightly less old than the hills, and I have no trouble adapting as long as there's an emacs add-on for it.
Ha, suck it, youngn's! We old farts are better at figurin' shit out, so bite that onion I wears on mah belt!
Now where's that damn new-fangled "sumbit" button doohickey thingy or whatever the hell it's called....Oh shoot, Matlock is on, gotta go.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The Windows XP loyalists, anti Windows 10 fanatics, System D gray beards, they all seem to have one thing in common.
Most of them are over 40. I have not seen any of these people in the field for those under 30. True some concerned about privacy bash Windows 10 here and there, but I remember the people at work trying to put off leaving Windows XP back in 2014 and silently trying not to strangle me when I put 7 on there systems.
These same coworkers now say Windows 7 is the BEST EVER. They refuse Chrome for many years as well and kept using IE.
I guess it takes brain muscle to learn something new
http://saveie6.com/
Young workers have seen enough good technology to know broken useless shit when they see it, whereas the senile old farts are too busy writing the broken useless shit in to look like COBOL and compile in VB.NET to complain - plus they couldn't figure out how to do the survey in that newfangled "browser" thing.
Most older people have already seen, even used, most, if not all, "new" technology under a different UI.
With a sample size of ~700 for each of six regions, the data collected is pretty much useless. Can anybody even find a methodology document?
Even if you want to accept the data, the narrative which emerges is not that older workers are more successful at using new technology, but that they are accustomed to using a bunch of old technology. In the break-down of device use, the following items are the ones which shift the number of devices used toward older workers: "Printer", "Scanner, "Fax Machine", "Landline Phone", "Mobile Phone (not a smart phone)". Younger people use "Smartphones" and "Projectors" more than the older cohorts ("Augmented Reality" is too small to count). Older workers are also decidedly less "excited about new technology products" than younger workers.
Let's just do ip over shortwave
They won't have a clue
Most 20 somethings are really good at using their phones, but most have no idea how it works - nor should they have to. People keep calling them 'tech savvy' but it's really a bad phrase. They're highly effective app USERS. You do have those who are really brilliant and actually tech savvy and build their own devices from scratch, but they chose it, or it chose them.
On the other hand, if you grew up with Windows then you either developed some problem solving skills or you were completely baffled all the time - the learned helplessness people. Macs were only relatively better because they narrowed the amount of things that could go wrong by reducing your choices, but there was still plenty that could go wrong. In my office, for instance, you have highly nerdy types of all ages (19 to 62) who have no problem with dealing with anything. On the other hand, outside that group the device problem solving skills seem strongest in the 40 year olds.
So yes, we grew up with shitty tech and because of that when something goes wrong those who learned to deal with it go into problem solving mode instead of bafflement mode.
Getting off track here, but tech problem solvers are really easy to spot - step 1: try it again paying closer attention, step 2: check the options (or man), step 3: [search engine of your choice] it. That solves 99.9% of all issues, and anyone who's actually tech savvy knows those, so I can categorize people pretty fast that way.
At one point I got paid to tape
Over that blinking vcr clock
We had to walk 5 miles to school in the snow and rain, and it was all up hill ... both ways!
Sorry, there's a tendency for some /. people to insert their lame personal anecdotes into these comments. Here's mine:
I built my first computer from chips on a breadboard- a 6800 processor with 256 bytes of RAM. I programmed it with a hex keypad and it output results on seven segment LEDs. If I wanted alphabetic letters I had to force the normally numeric LEDs to simulate text by specifying each segment that was to be lit or dark. There was no storage. After painstakingly succeeding to enter a program that worked (such as a thermometer or other primitive program) I had to hope the power didn't fail or I'd lose everything.
Yadda yadda. The point is that tech doesn't scare me now that I'm in my 70s. I understand the hardware and the software and I keep a hammer close by in case some device should become annoying.
...omphaloskepsis often...
will adapt faster to using eclipse than someone who has never programmed before.
I'm mad because I can't control the universe with them.
I'm not upset that they can't control the universe - I just think they stretch the truth too much in their advertising. I understand that advertisers are known to stretch the truth a bit, and I might give them a pass if they only controlled a galaxy cluster, but heck, the ones I've used can't even control this planet let alone this galaxy. Geesh.
I'm left to wonder if in some specific galaxy far, far, away, things get louder when I press the "volume up" button.
Now, those "multi-entertainment-device remote controls" that let me control most or all of my entertainment devices, those I don't have any problems with, at least not with respect to their marketing claims.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In part because we have significant experience and therefore patience with sucky technology. That's due to both the fact we grew up with technology as the technology got better, and because some of our key experiences (Windows, for example) sucked so badly.
But there was a decided difference between my gradeschool compatriots and the idiots I meet in daily life today.
Even amongst the 'poor' in my schools in the late 80s/early 90s everyone either had a secondhand console, or a secondhand computer. Back in those days there was enough competition in the market that out of a class of 30, we had 10 different consoles/computers amongst us. Fast forward 10-15 years, everybody had a PC and a similiar dumb cell phone (the rich kids had pagers, and amongst the HS girls entertained each other by sneaking off to the on-campus payphone and 'buzzing' each other.) While the market broadened a little bit with Apple's migration to x86 and the success of the iPhone/Android, overall people have less experience with 'different' tech today compared to the 60s-early 90s period when there were dozens of big tech companies and hundreds of small ones, all with tools that were optimized for problems *AS THEY SAW THEM*, rather than the sort of homologated UIX that has come to epitomize the modern era, even as everyone tries to lock lazy and inexperienced consumers into their 'slightly different' UI. Those of us with broad tech experience can futz around and usually figure it out, but the true consumer class can't intuit anything out of the norm because they've only used maybe 3 different devices and have no idea what to do when faced with something that doesn't conform to their expectations.
...is there an app for that?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Maybe it's only because old IT workers who are still there are the best and most motivated from their generation, others may have moved to other fields or positions (management for example). This natural selection has not yet operated on the newest generation, I guess in 20 years the same study will give similar results.
they need you to work your ass off. You can't or won't put in 60-80 hour work weeks. Investors make their money not by being geniuses but by having a shitload of money and being able to throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks (with the added bonus that if they _really_ fuck up their gov'ts will bail them out since they are, after all, the ruling class).
Iteration is more important than reproducible results in most cases. Those cases where it's not a young guy trying to establish himself and get enough scratch to start a family will be far more productive.
With few exceptions old people can't compete with young people when it comes to profitability. You just can't work that hard after 40. Not sure about the rest of the world but in America we like to treat outliers like their normal and demand everybody either work that hard or drop dead trying. I think the rest of the world isn't like that, but I also think their ruling class has noticed how much better our ruling class' private jets and yachts are and they're taking notes. RE: Britain's Muslim scare.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Really, it's a matter of expectations, and Dunning Kruger effect. Throw in a little bit of ego, and fun times await.
Software development today is where it is because of several decades of lessons learned. That being said, there is still a massive gulf between enterprise software and consumer software. The subject of my comment is because I remember when I first played around with setting up Oracle, and how frustrating it was. Over a decade later, not much has changed.
The problem is there is now a very different level of expectation. When computers were older, they were expected to be difficult, because... well.... they were. But nowadays, it's easier to assemble a PC than to build a lego model. In the consumer space, software is generally more accessible than it ever was (although with the way UIs have been going lately, focusing more on being artistic than useful, I'd argue that we're taking a step backwards).
So people now think that computers are easier than ever, when the harsh reality is that computers are actually even more complicated than ever before, because they do more and more behind the scenes, and *someone* has to code that in.
What bothers me the most are hotshot people who look at this complexity and, instead of trying to overcome it, they just take the easiest way out they can, lessons learned be damned. The end result are bullshit like the NoSQL movement, because people consider SQL to be "too hard". Boy are they in for a shock when it comes time to actually query that hodge-podge of JSON to produce reports 'n stuff.
I remember a "team lead" that argued with a developer who rightly refused to use a floating point field to store currency information. The developer had to explain in detail exactly how the floating point format actually worked, and why it would be a really bad idea. It took 2 hours of insistent explanation before the hotshot acquiesced.
... are better at controlling the narrative than younger tech journalists.
At least that's the message I got from not bothering to read the fine article.
I could tell from the headline, and having seen a number of articles in my time.
I kept hearing about REST REST REST at work. I had to ask what the term was. They explained it.
Oh, that thing I did 15 years ago. Before it had a fancy name. It was called "programming" back then
and get off my lawn.
NoSQL databases == hierarchical databases
Unstructured data[*] = recipe card normalization
Graph databases == network databases such as IDM or IDMS
Java => UCSD Pascal
Machine Learning == pretty much Bayesian statistics (I haven't seen the rules based or simulated annealing versions of ML though. Are there such beasts?)
Go == an upgrade of C
R, Scala, Haskell, etc. => basically LISP
That's just off of the top of my head.
Some of the details differ but the basic concepts don't change very much. If you are good at generalizing and you see it a second time it becomes old hat. Boring at times, and infuriating when you see the same old mistakes being made over and over again[**]
[*] seriously, unstructured data is noise. If you don't understand that you shouldn't be in tech.
[**] Non ACID compliance? WTF?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
....that I started using computers in the early-mid 1980s (i'm 39) where you were very lucky if your home computer had a floppy disk drive, and have been using consistantly scince as they evolved to what they are now. Most kids today don't even know what an audio cassette is, let alone that that is how many of us loaded up our games.
....is a millenial try to operate a spirit duplicator machine (a chemical copy machine). You know, the ones that went "KER-CHUNK KER-CHUNK" as they spit out those bad quality purple-ink test forms in school a few decades+ back?
I hear that. In my office we've got a young guy that will only program in one language and one language only and absolutely refuses to move to any other language. It doesn't matter the project, if its his to do it's only ever written in this one language.
On top of that, a few of us older folks in the office find that he has zero idea of what it means to be on a team. Things like leaving his work for others to do, etc. I really hope he is a one-off and not a true representation of the younger generation.
At my workplace, older people think using computers sucks and Microsoft confirms that. Younger people know there are better ways and make more noise when we bang our heads against the Microsoft cage of shit.
Well, no duh... It is us older workers who actually invented the radios, computers, cell phones, space craft, satellites etc. So maybe it is no wonder that it is the young-uns who have no clue how it all came to be, that are stressed by it all.
of course. It's called experience, skill and expertise. Fuck the millenials! Get off my lawn!
By that standard, the dead are even better.
Younger people have been using tech all their lives, but us old farts have been adapting to new tech all our lives.
Also, who do you think built all the tech?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
... just lazy after a lifetime of gluttony.
This media bias against millennials will finally hit a wall when Gen X dies out, I guess.
Adapting to the new takes a higher frustration tolerance - which older people have. At least if they are still in the workforce and have an incentive to be more frustration tolerant. In other words, if you are a somewhat mentally and physically healthy older person, you experience with the world and yourself gives you an edge when adopting to the new.
Actually not that surprising if you think about it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You don't get it. When the guy said "what are books?", it was a joke. Maybe not the joke of the year, but a joke by any standard. When you replied to that joke "thanks for proving his point", that wasn't remotely funny. That didn't even had the appearance of a joke, which explains the reaction of the other guy (and mine).
Jokes are a social contract that you can't enforce unilaterally; if people don't understand your jokes it means you're not funny, full stop. There's no higher authority you can appeal to.
Here's a pro tip. The further down the chain you are in a chain of jokes, the more clever and spectacular you have to be to avoid sounding like you're trying to coattail someone else's joke. Leave the third or fourth levels to experts until you've mastered the art of humor.
lucm, indeed.
If you look at people who have been involved with technology for 20 plus years. That technology has changed dramatically and If they are still involved with technology they have learned how to adjust to the changes. Those people who could not adjust to the change will be left behind, and not have jobs that require with technology, and maybe not have jobs period. The 20 somethings start with a more modern base, but a significant number of them will not be able to adjust as the technology changes under neath them.
Good example of that with systemd. You'd think the world was ending by the bitching and moaning of so many people and every one of them that I have talked to that had a problem with it was under 25. Us older Unix people were like - eh? Just a new way to do things. How do we do it... Next.
Make up your mind, is it "adapting to NEW (better) technology" or "making do with shit that ain't as good as what you have at home?" I'm 40, and I've always found older technology than I've seen before very fustrating.
I think it's not just enough to be a "digital native" as they call it, because it really doesn't take a lot of critical thinking, troubleshooting skills, etc. to use modern technology. Smartphone and tablet operating systems are incredibly simple; my 5 year old is quite a proficient user. These devices don't even have a traditional filesystem or other concepts that a regular computer would have. We've abstracted away most of the complexity even in desktop operating systems. Almost all software and websites are cargo-culting the touch-centric UI. It's easy to just pick up and use something without lots of backstory.
I'm not saying that's bad -- look at how many consume-only home users have had their needs satisfied by a locked down tablet or phone. It's just that being "good with computers" means something different now. Almost everyone can use a traditional office suite to do simple documents, knows what email is, knows how to use web applications, etc. This was definitely not the case 20 years ago, or even 10.
The thing is that this complexity doesn't just go away - but it is pulled up to the next level and often is out of the reach of simple consumers. Who is old enough to remember how painful it was manually tweaking your PC's operating environment to get things like sound cards and other hardware playing nicely together? No one does that anymore, but someone at some point hacked together the plug and play standards, and OS vendors get to deal with this stuff under the hood now. Older tech users have this backstory that the younger crowd has to work very hard to understand, because no one sees how insanely complex all this stuff is under the hood unless they peel back the covers and really do a full study on it.
So yes, at the risk of sounding old, I think this study makes a lot of sense. Unless you work at a Web 2.0 hipster startup that's writing everything in from scratch in the cloud, you're bound to run into some old technology. Whether you complain about it or just get on with it might depend on your comfort level with something that isn't consumer facing.
...is confidence. Give me a new tool and I am confident I can use it because I know it is just a tool designed to automate work I already know how to do manually. The belief that I can use it gives me confidence which colleagues and customers take comfort in. To a young person the tool is something unknown to them they would need to study to understand why it exists. They lack the experience to know the work it replaces as they only know the limited subset of knowledge they were taught.
Now get off my lawn unless you plan to mow it for a dime.
Millennials will be great in comfort levels of new tech, the learning curve is easy for them, but the value extraction is much harder--they don't know what to really do with new tech aside from being given what the developers provide.
Older folks will likely find great benefits of tech, though maybe frustrated at the initial learning curve and likely know how to improve or find faults of the developer' design.
Why? Experience matters.