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> As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. > They are the futur
by gcanyon 3y ago
> As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there.
> They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.
> Look at the real people, and you’ll see the honest future for yourself.
Maybe I'm the outlier, but this is 100% not true for me. My title, Product Manager, didn't exist 30 years ago. I was a developer 20 years ago, and 10 years before that I was managing and supporting a network of 200 Mac Pluses and the like. I've done other things besides, and at no point did the older people where I worked look the way I did years later.
I do focus a significant amount of energy on keeping up with the development of technology, and that has changed so much that I couldn't help but be different.
But I think that applies to everyone working in technology. The developers I work with now are using TypeScript and we organize using Notion. Ten years ago it was PHP and Jira. Ten years before that it was Java and Office docs. Who knows what it will be in ten years, but almost certainly none of those. Two week sprints have been a thing for fifteen years, so maybe that will still be true, but I doubt it.
Plan for change. It's coming for all of us.
- mejutoco 3y ago> Ten years ago it was PHP and Jira. Ten years before that ... I recognize this is a matter of perspective, because to me the examples you mention are fundamentally not very different. A middle manager working in a programming language might be a way to put it that sounds the same as the old job. Which exact programming language, etc. can be seen as details, depending on the context. When seen through this lens the perspective of seeing the old worker still applies I believe.
- gcanyon 3y agoGranted, Notion isn't that different from Jira experientially -- it is vastly more flexible. But there's no comparing today's "everyone has a ticketing/task management system" setup to how things worked in the ~2000 Java era. We produced massive word documents to describe what we were going to do, and then broke them down to gantt charts in excel, and agreed what we were going to build in advance with formal sign-off by all participants. It was a very different feeling.
- ornornor 3y agoI worked at a large-ish company like that recently, that is stuck in the past. On the surface, they’re “Agile(tm)” because they have sprints and retros. But at the level above middle managers, it’s all huge word documents, Gantt charts, formal sign offs, and then later the blame game when it invariably fails to meet both deadline and requirements. I was too young to work in the 00s, but that was a miserable job. I had colleagues who had been there for decades and others that started as apprentices there and retired in the couple of years I was there… that’s all they’ve ever known and worked at this one place only. It totally blew my mind.