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.

Comments

Well, no crap

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Well, no crap

[TheRaven64]

There's also likely to be a lot of survivor bias, even if the reporting is accurate. If you work for 30 years in an industry that changes buzzwords every 18 months and major parts of the core technology every 10 years, then you have to be good at adapting to change - if you're not then you probably didn't stay in the industry that long. 20 years ago, pre-.NET Visual Basic was one of the most in-demand skills for business software, along with ActiveX and a bunch of related things. Now most people don't even remember what those were. Most UNIX systems either didn't support threads or, if they did, had their own proprietary threading APIs - if you wanted parallelism, that's what fork() was for. Someone in that environment who had marketable skills 20 years ago, and still has marketable skills today, has seen and adapted to a lot of changes. The ones that couldn't handle it moved into the management track.

Kids can't use computers

[DogDude]

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.

Re:Gen X'er here

[Billly Gates]

Actually it is the millennials who like the hamburger menus in 8 and 10.

They feel file menus are cluttered and soo dated. They prefer no effects and focus on the content rather than the icing on the cake and like it minimal and touch friendly. It is really the other way around as their brains grew the most in their childhood playing on their iphones and ipads. Windows 7 seems drastically different to them in comparison.

well when I was young . . .

[swell]

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.