The New Generation

[GardoneVT]

My kids are 21 and 30 now. Looking back I would have made them do more chores and got a job at an earlier age to better instill work ethic. Raising kids in the suburbs gave them a great education...the schools were truly great. But they spent too much time on the internet, goofing off with friends, on their phones and playing games. My view is that many, but not all, of this current generation between 20-30 just don't have the kind of work ethic that is needed to be successful in our modern competitive workplace.
Cody

The flip side to that coin is, ethics in general is a four letter word in far too many companies these days. Work ethic in many firms today just means youll be tired when the layoff email pops up.

While the following is heavily dependent on the culture of a company, many places of employment today operate on the "to hell with the Core Values board, kiss your superior's rear and do what they say no matter the ethical or legal problems-or get out ". Today job hunting for my generation today is dependent on finding an opening, and then ensuring the company in question isnt a kittenimg fraud before applying.

[Bigguy]

In some cases, at least. work ethic manifests itself differently now than it did in my day.
I've hired people in their 20s and early 30s for coding work. These folks are competent in several languages and systems. Now-a-days, most web sites run something similar to PHP, pulling the data from a database such as SQL. The ones I dealt with also knew at least a little Java, and Python. I decided that I was going to get into this, but my eyes quickly glazed over. This was not something i was going to learn in a few hours per week. This was going to take massive amounts of time. I'm not lazy and am at least average intelligence. See below for my history of self improvement. I couldn't believe that this stuff was so difficult for me. Then I discovered that these "kids," hadn't learned it in a few hours either. In the case of my two best ones, they both had deals with their wives that they would not code on two days per week. The rest of the time, they coded all day at work, then went home and coded all evening. These guys were putting in at least 80 hours per week, either coding, or improving their coding skills. Playing on the computer as some would call it.
And as hardworking as these young people were, many of my contemporaries thought them lazy. More than one middle manager has asked why we pay these people to sit around and play on a computer all day.

There was a time when I loved living on the bleeding edge. In 1988, when I started at the Gazette, I routinely put in 80 hour per weeks. 40 of those hours were off the clock and unpaid, because overtime wasn't authorized. I took great pride in my work and simply couldn't stand the idea of something going to press that didn't meet my definition of acceptable. I don't recall ever being satisfied with anything. I could always find at least a couple of things I'd have done differently, given the chance to do the project again. And because I was making church mouse wages, even with 80 hours average at the paper, I took on freelance work to help pay the bills. I taught my self assembly programing of the Z80 processor (TRS80) and interpreted basic in the early 80s. I had taken Fortran in college, but you can imagine how well that prepared me for the real world of 1980. Later I took classes, on my own, in RPGII, and later MIS (remember that acronym?) classes. In the early days of the Internet, I taught myself HTML and set up a few websites.
Moving from graphics to IT, my job description was largely pluck and chuck hardware maintenance and pulling cable. Throw in a little telco support and maintenance and repair of film processors, images setting equipment, and cameras, and you see how I lost track of the coding world. I eventually decided to catch back up with coding because I got tired of depending on web designers to make the changes I wanted on our site.
As I mentioned earlier, now-a-days, most web sites run something similar to PHP, pulling the data from a database such as SQL. So I find me some SQL and PHP tutorials and proceed to learn.

Nope! I don't know if it's just because I'm older, or this stuff is really that much harder than what I cut my teeth on. But one thing is for sure. Starting my second half-century on this earth, I'll spend my non-paid time doing fun stuff with my wife. I just hire the kids for the coding.

[JRB]

The flip side to that coin is, ethics in general is a four letter word in far too many companies these days. Work ethic in many firms today just means youll be tired when the layoff email pops up.

While the following is heavily dependent on the culture of a company, many places of employment today operate on the "to hell with the Core Values board, kiss your superior's rear and do what they say no matter the ethical or legal problems-or get out ". Today job hunting for my generation today is dependent on finding an opening, and then ensuring the company in question isnt a kittenimg fraud before applying.

That bolded part - I lived through that exact thing twice, both within my first 6 years in the grown-up workforce. One of the times, they laid me off a week before they'd meant to by accident, and halfway through the 'sit down' my boss's boss walked in, and asked me to finish the project I was working on before I left.
I did, and even left a bunch of build notes on the project and cleaned up my area of the shop before I left the final day. Then, because they'd dropped me from payroll first and foremost, I had to wait for 6 weeks to actually get paid for that last week of work.

They must have regretted letting me go, because a couple months later I got a voicemail from my boss's boss asking me to come back to work, saying and I quote 'I had no idea how much you did for us' and offered me a $1/hr raise if I did. But I didn't get that until 2 months or so after he'd left it, because that's when I finally got my cell phone back after I completed BCT at Ft Knox.

[TGS]

Millennial vs everyone else.

Eh.

I don't get into it too much anymore. I'm a millennial and half of the employees I'm in charge of are Gen X'rs, so I guess I have a sort of "eat shit" attitude when Gen Xrs try to tell me that I'm flawed based on my generation. The worst two employees I've had....by far....were Gen X'rs.

What I will say on a broader social scale is I never appreciated the people I served with in the USMC. Even the shitbags, even the guys who weren't making it physically or technically, were tenfold better human beings than what I've come to expect as average the civilian workforce. I didn't appreciate that until I got out. Obvious exceptions for the outliers are given, but the people I served with were cut from a cross-section of society that represents the very best.....and they were millennials.

So......

...eat shit.

[JHC]

Millennial vs everyone else.

Eh.

I don't get into it too much anymore. I'm a millennial and half of the employees I'm in charge of are Gen X'rs, so I guess I have a sort of "eat shit" attitude when Gen Xrs try to tell me that I'm flawed based on my generation. The worst two employees I've had....by far....were Gen X'rs.

What I will say on a broader social scale is I never appreciated the people I served with in the USMC. Even the shitbags, even the guys who weren't making it physically or technically, were tenfold better human beings than what I've come to expect as average the civilian workforce. I didn't appreciate that until I got out. Obvious exceptions for the outliers are given, but the people I served with were cut from a cross-section of society that represents the very best.....and they were millennials.

So......

...eat shit.

I like that.

[Robinson]

Later I took classes, on my own, in RPGII

Wow, there's a blast from the past. Today's RPG language is so far removed from its roots.

[MDS]

I taught my self assembly programing of the Z80 processor (TRS80) and interpreted basic in the early 80s.

Awesome. I made my first dollar in 1983 selling device drivers for the trash eighty. My favorite gig of all time was doing an review for a state police agency of the Z80 code in their breathalyzers, as the court's independent expert, because a DUI guy claimed "well, how do we know the code does what they say it does?" (Ironically, the two days of touring Kentucky's bourbon country might have helped shape my thoughts on that gig.)

But I have to say, as to the topic of the new generation and their work ethic, that I'm a huge fan of laziness. It is, as you may know if you've been coding that long, the first of Larry's Three Virtues of a Programmer. I'm a big believer, because I've seen it happen over and over, that evolutionary forces will reward the most advantageous efforts - regardless of whether we think they're good based on our subjective values and priorities. I've had more than a few millennials work for me, and FWIW they've been no worse than any other age group, if you objectively judge by outcome. They're different than me, I'd take very different approaches to producing those outcomes, but I've put objective output measures in place (in my mind it's a test harness for people) and according to those measures they're the same mix of good and bad as anyone else - probably significantly higher if you adjust for expectations based on experience and education.

So, based on my purely anecdotal experience, I have to wonder: how much of our judgment of the "new generation" reflects an objective reality, and how much of it reflects our own baggage?

[Bigguy]

So, based on my purely anecdotal experience, I have to wonder: how much of our judgment of the "new generation" reflects an objective reality, and how much of it reflects our own baggage?

That whole long post of mine, blathering away about programming was actually trying to say that sentence. Couldn't agree more.

Wow, there's a blast from the past. Today's RPG language is so far removed from its roots.

Yeah. We didn't actually use cards, but the code was entered in card like segments. We literally entered characters in blocks, with some blocks reserved for specific functions, just like the punched holes in a card reader would have used. But if you liked RPGII, did you catch my reference to FORTRAN? I actually did use cards for that on an IBM mainframe. Can't remember the model. Is FORTRAN still used anywhere?

[RoyGBiv]

FWIW, my first computer programming class was WATFIV and all data entry was done on punch cards.

So... GET OFF MY LAWN, ya lazy kids.

[pax]

Started to write something here, then realized that smarter people than myself have already said most of it.

From a long time ago: “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” -- Socrates

More recently: "Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools." – George Chapman, All Fools, 1605

Even more recently: "Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." – George Orwell

So it's not like there's anything new going on here. Oh, that lazy, good-for-nothing next generation! Oh, those foolish and feckless youth! If only they were more like us, and less like themselves!

But...

"To have lived long does not necessarily imply the gathering of much wisdom and experience. A man who has pedaled twenty-five thousand miles on a stationary bicycle has not circled the globe. He has only garnered weariness." – Paul Eldridge

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." – H. L. Mencken

"The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools." – Doug Larson

And that's about it.

pax