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

[Anonymous Coward]

Things haven't changed nearly as much in the past twenty years as they did the twenty years before that. Of course they can't work with change because they haven't had to.

Re: Well, no crap

[ShanghaiBill]

TFA doesn't present any evidence that millennials are better or worse than oldsters at adapting to tech. It is just that they self-report having more problems. So an obvious alternative hypothesis is that millennials just complain about things more.

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.

Generations

[ledow]

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.

Re:Generations

[bws111]

Either you don't realize there is a difference between healthy older people and those with dementia, or you think all older people have dementia. Unless he had dementia, it is very unlikely your grandfather was 'completely baffled' by any of those things.

A few weeks ago we had a party for my parents, and their friends were there. The ages ranged from 70 to 90. Almost all of them had cell phones, and many were taking pictures and posting them to Facebook. Of the ones that didn't have cell phones, some couldn't see well enough to use one, and one said it hurt his hands too much to hold one.

Your comments about 'old people homes' are absurd. There are basically three types of 'od people homes': senior housing, assisted living, and nursing home. For the first two types, the residents CHOOSE to live there, so the facilities provide whatever amenities that will attract residents. OF COURSE they provide Internet service.

But I guess when you say old people home, you mean nursing home. Those people are not there because they want to be, they are there because they can't care for themselves or make their own decisions. Some can't feed themselves, some can't use the bathroom, some don't even know their children's names. But you think if you wind up there a concern is going to be Internet access? Are you already insane?

Damn right we are.

[Lumpy]

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.

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.

Gen X'er here

[cowtamer]

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 :)

If it just works, you don't learn much

[Sarusa]

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.

Re:So it's just a survey

[93 Escort Wagon]

Very few younglings know how to write a perl one-liner.

- Take Larry Wall... please!

- Larry Wall just flew in from the coast today... and boy are his arms tired!