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There are some places that still work the old way, such as where I work - and we're finding we're increasingly out-of-touch with younger developers who grew up

There are some places that still work the old way, such as where I work - and we're finding we're increasingly out-of-touch with younger developers who grew up in a connected world. We had a recent college grad engineer (developer) who didn't work out as a hire. Some examples of the disconnect: Try as I might, I couldn't get him to understand the difference between "git" the tool and "Github" the website. He kept making me nervous because he'd slip up and use the two terms interchangeably. (We have sensitive data that shouldn't be uploaded to the cloud.) He didn't seem to completely understand files/folders and the desktop metaphor. He didn't seem to understand the difference between personal devices and work devices. The last straw for our boss to let him go was he turned in a project that used a free web service on the cloud to upload data and get back the rows sorted. (Refer back to what I said above about: sensitive data.) It didn't appear he was being obstinate, it was a tech-cultural difference. "Radical semantic disconnect" as I've seen the term used in science fiction.

FearNotDaniel 4y ago
Oh dear, sounds like a tricky one, but I'm not sure that the "cultural" difference is what really mattered: the question is, did he have a willingness to understand where his worldview was falling short; to see that his limited experience of the world and college education was only a tiny subset of human experience and technical practices; to actively engage with those differences and continue learning? Unfortunately over the years I've also had some bad experiences with recent grads and the biggest problems usually boiled down to arrogance rather than ignorance... e.g. I can sort-of understand somewhere along the line that someone could have mistakenly learned that this new thing called "unicode" was invented for unix machines (after all, the names sort of sound similar) and that therefore we have absolutely no business trying to use it on a Windows system. But to then absolutely insist until you are blue in the face that you must be right about this because you learned it in college and everyone else in the team is just wrong, no matter what evidence is produced... well that is a difficult situation that I have personally encountered.
white_dragon88 4y ago
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sumtechguy 4y ago
That is not a youner/older thing. That is just someone who does not understand the tech they are working with. I had one dude about 10 years ago roll into our org with the source code from another company. He saw nothing wrong with it. Our lawyers disagreed. I never let it past the code review stage.

FearNotDaniel 4y ago

Oh dear, sounds like a tricky one, but I'm not sure that the "cultural" difference is what really mattered: the question is, did he have a willingness to understand where his worldview was falling short; to see that his limited experience of the world and college education was only a tiny subset of human experience and technical practices; to actively engage with those differences and continue learning? Unfortunately over the years I've also had some bad experiences with recent grads and the biggest problems usually boiled down to arrogance rather than ignorance... e.g. I can sort-of understand somewhere along the line that someone could have mistakenly learned that this new thing called "unicode" was invented for unix machines (after all, the names sort of sound similar) and that therefore we have absolutely no business trying to use it on a Windows system. But to then absolutely insist until you are blue in the face that you must be right about this because you learned it in college and everyone else in the team is just wrong, no matter what evidence is produced... well that is a difficult situation that I have personally encountered.

white_dragon88 4y ago

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sumtechguy 4y ago

That is not a youner/older thing. That is just someone who does not understand the tech they are working with. I had one dude about 10 years ago roll into our org with the source code from another company. He saw nothing wrong with it. Our lawyers disagreed. I never let it past the code review stage.