6 ms·

GenZ software engineers, according to older colleagues

58 points by 0x54MUR41 3y ago

protastus 3y ago
Seems like they're mostly describing young people. Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
- atoav 3y ago
  I teach electronics and programming at an art school/university. One trend I have noticed is that young people have increasingly unrealistic expectations how difficult certain things are. I blame DIY youtube/tiktok for this — you know the kind where it looks very simple, as if it takes a minute and boof you have a cool thing. I often have to explain to them why the thing that they saw working for 2 seconds in that tiktok clip will likely not work unattended for their full day exhibition weekend. But those are some people from that generation, there are just as many that just want to learn and don't want to take shortcuts. I agree however that overestimating your own abilities is a generic trait of you g people regardless of generation — but that is how they learn — how we all learned.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  > Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, In general people protest when they can't just change things on their own terms. Arguably older generations have less of the issue (but really, they like to yell at the clouds like everyone else IMHO) > not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks. Someone with enough experience will be better at masking these traits and not have their process violations or risk taking surface too much. Either it's completely transparent to everyone and people don't even acknowledge it as process violations (e.g. the more experienced worker just happens to have higher permissions and can officially do whatever they want. Staying 3 or 4 years at a place will give you an amount of permissions that wouldn't make sense on paper for your role) or they know how to stay under the radar.
politelemon 3y ago
The affinity for bleeding edge, and working higher up the stack, is not a genz specific trait, it's every younger developer since the beginning of developers. Every next generation goes through this and rediscovers all the concepts the previous generation did.
- xxs 3y ago
  Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.
    - cyco130 3y ago
      But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.
philprx 3y ago
Paid content click bait
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  I can access it for free, it's Medium you probably read too many articles there. Use private navigation.
  - anonymoushn 3y ago
    It says "This post is for paid subscribers."
    - nailz1911 3y ago
      Odd! Works for me. Try https://archive.ph/jLoq7 https://archive.ph/jLoq7
      - pcthrowaway 3y ago
        Scroll to the bottom of that link.
      - black3r 3y ago
        Even there you only see the first 3 points. Under the 4th headline it says the rest is for paid subscribers only. And the article states that it has 8 sections at the beginning.
      - MyFedora 3y ago
        Section 4 to 8 are only accessible to paid subscribers, even with your link.
sentfromrevolut 3y ago
There wont be any. ChatGPT and a smaller number of Millennial generation experts are going to be running the show from here on
- atoav 3y ago
  Let me guess: You are not working in any technical role? I ask, because this opinion is something you'd often hear from marketing people or the manegerial type — people that are eye-wateringly naive when it comes to tech.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  You’re being downvoted, but this has started happening in finance. (That said, I think your generations are off. We’re still another leap off from not needing human coders.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Broussebar 3y ago
So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company. IMO I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal which means more money or more benefits.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.
  - episteme 3y ago
    You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow I really don’t believe this is possible, but maybe others can hide it better. > People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one Agree on loyalty. But that’s different from holding a limited view of engagement.
      - rokkitmensch 3y ago
        > perhaps others can hide it better Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.
  - roenxi 3y ago
SCdF 3y ago
I remember reading the identical points made about millennials when we were coming up, in comparison to genx. It's almost if it's about how old experienced people interpret young inexperienced people, and not a generational marketing buzzword aligned concept. FWIW the zoomers I work with seem, apart from the fact that they watch tiktok, basically identical to how I remember being new in the field.
- rvense 3y ago
  And we had Reddit/Digg/StumbleUpon, so...
MyFedora 3y ago
A bit of advice for the author: If you want to get votes for you poll, then don't require participants to subscribe to your newsletter. I see it as a waste of my time.
- mid-kid 3y ago
  they don't want votes, they want subscriptions to the newsletter...
ojbyrne 3y ago
As a boomer (unemployed, but who cares) I feel a connection.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
p1nkpineapple 3y ago
As a Gen Zer myself, parts of this rubbed me the wrong way in the sense that it feels like many gen X/boomers are applying the mindset that got them their success in their early life is still relevant today. We've become jaded growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in - in my home country we have massive cost of living increases, ever-nascent climate change, housing shortages and income inequality, aging population combined with policy changes that make life better for the boomer generation. Many of my peers have given up hope that they will ever be able to buy their own home. We're stressed, lonely, and are a generation of test subjects to big-tech's addiction machines. Working in tech has it's benefits and I am lucky to not be faced with many of these issues personally, but I know plenty of people my age and younger that have gone past the stage of "terrified for the world their kids will grow up in" and into a numb subsistence.
- TheChaplain 3y ago
  Don't worry, approaching retirement your generation will feel the heat from younger ones. They will resent you for whatever you did or didn't, and you will judge them for not understanding or (not) doing XYZ.
pmontra 3y ago
I wonder if it is really possible to compare generations across the world. In my country generations didn't even have a name until recently when 15-20 yo started talking about millenials, Z and boomers, where boomers are anybody about the age of their parents and more. Technically most of those parents are generation X, some even Y. I learned it by reading the article now. Furthermore and more importantly different social and economic dynamics mean that people of the supposed same generation are different, especially when generations span only a few years. They watch the same videos but the world around them could be significantly different. A generation in one part of the world could be more similar to the previous or the next one somewhere else. Anyway, probably all results still hold true if we think about evaluating the differences between people that entered the job market recently and colleagues that have been working for 10 or 20 years.
- thefz 3y ago
  > I wonder if it is really possible to compare generations across the world. I find the Gen-XYZ thing to be mostly american culture war. And sadly I think this is just another tool in their culture to create division, and of course conquer as consequence.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I kind of agree but I think that it could be an internal marketing thing, to create cohorts inside the USA to make it easier to sell every sort of stuff to them. Then it spilled internationally because of the cultural influence of the USA. I'd appreciate if anybody from the USA could tell me if my hypothesis is at least plausible. According to Wikipedia [1] "The contemporary characterization of these cohorts used in media and advertising borrows, in part, from the Strauss–Howe generational theory" but the chart over there despite being captioned as "Timeline of generations in the Western world" seems to be very USA specific given the definitions in the text that follows it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
    - thefz 3y ago
      > Then it spilled internationally because of the cultural influence of the USA. I don't know, the rare times in which I hear someone use derived terms like "boomer", they get weird looks like they are some sort of imbecile. This kind of division does not get much traction in Europe, I guess.
000ooo000 3y ago
>A note of caution: of course, it’s impossible to sum up a whole generation based on a mix of opinions from a few workplaces! Ironic that this article feels I'm the one who needs warning
tennisflyi 3y ago
> “From my old-school perspective, they are somewhat entitled, expecting flexibility, yearly raises and promotions – even when the company has no need for more managers, for example. They also expect significant benefits on top of our higher-than-market pay. > As many before me have said, they have cast off outdated expectations of ‘loyalty’ to jobs that aren't loyal to them, in return. It's admirable for the most part, though I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.” > – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US) That's been the de facto for a while and now it's just gone. Second part is wild
znpy 3y ago
"[...] I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.” – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US) See, here is the problem. If the company is increasing its earning then i want a raise too, because i contributed to that increase. And if the company is not increasing its earning i might look around because the company might not be doing so well. Due to inflation and other factors, cost of living is increasing anyway, so either way you should give out some form of raise every year (at the very least). As another millennial... GenZ'ers just got this right. I had to live through this and understand it, but it seems to be natural to them, somehow? They just got this right, and most people can (should?) only learn.
johnea 3y ago
> Some found that the GenZ were too open, insensitive, and should be more sensitive of their environment, and of people hearing what they said. This is the exact opposite of what I've found, and what other older engineers and engineering managers I personally know have found. In genreal we find GenZ to be overly sensitive to technical critisism, and unwilling to speak bluntly about technical ramifications. This point alone makes me doubt the entire article...

58 points by 0x54MUR41 3y ago

Seems like they're mostly describing young people. Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.

atoav 3y ago
I teach electronics and programming at an art school/university. One trend I have noticed is that young people have increasingly unrealistic expectations how difficult certain things are. I blame DIY youtube/tiktok for this — you know the kind where it looks very simple, as if it takes a minute and boof you have a cool thing. I often have to explain to them why the thing that they saw working for 2 seconds in that tiktok clip will likely not work unattended for their full day exhibition weekend. But those are some people from that generation, there are just as many that just want to learn and don't want to take shortcuts. I agree however that overestimating your own abilities is a generic trait of you g people regardless of generation — but that is how they learn — how we all learned.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, In general people protest when they can't just change things on their own terms. Arguably older generations have less of the issue (but really, they like to yell at the clouds like everyone else IMHO) > not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks. Someone with enough experience will be better at masking these traits and not have their process violations or risk taking surface too much. Either it's completely transparent to everyone and people don't even acknowledge it as process violations (e.g. the more experienced worker just happens to have higher permissions and can officially do whatever they want. Staying 3 or 4 years at a place will give you an amount of permissions that wouldn't make sense on paper for your role) or they know how to stay under the radar.

politelemon 3y ago

The affinity for bleeding edge, and working higher up the stack, is not a genz specific trait, it's every younger developer since the beginning of developers. Every next generation goes through this and rediscovers all the concepts the previous generation did.

xxs 3y ago
Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.
  - cyco130 3y ago
    But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.

philprx 3y ago

Paid content click bait

iLoveOncall 3y ago
I can access it for free, it's Medium you probably read too many articles there. Use private navigation.
- anonymoushn 3y ago
  It says "This post is for paid subscribers."
  - nailz1911 3y ago
    Odd! Works for me. Try https://archive.ph/jLoq7 https://archive.ph/jLoq7
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Scroll to the bottom of that link.
    - black3r 3y ago
      Even there you only see the first 3 points. Under the 4th headline it says the rest is for paid subscribers only. And the article states that it has 8 sections at the beginning.
    - MyFedora 3y ago
      Section 4 to 8 are only accessible to paid subscribers, even with your link.

sentfromrevolut 3y ago

There wont be any. ChatGPT and a smaller number of Millennial generation experts are going to be running the show from here on

atoav 3y ago
Let me guess: You are not working in any technical role? I ask, because this opinion is something you'd often hear from marketing people or the manegerial type — people that are eye-wateringly naive when it comes to tech.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
You’re being downvoted, but this has started happening in finance. (That said, I think your generations are off. We’re still another leap off from not needing human coders.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Broussebar 3y ago

So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company. IMO I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal which means more money or more benefits.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.
- episteme 3y ago
  You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow I really don’t believe this is possible, but maybe others can hide it better. > People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one Agree on loyalty. But that’s different from holding a limited view of engagement.
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      > perhaps others can hide it better Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.
- roenxi 3y ago

SCdF 3y ago

I remember reading the identical points made about millennials when we were coming up, in comparison to genx. It's almost if it's about how old experienced people interpret young inexperienced people, and not a generational marketing buzzword aligned concept. FWIW the zoomers I work with seem, apart from the fact that they watch tiktok, basically identical to how I remember being new in the field.

rvense 3y ago
And we had Reddit/Digg/StumbleUpon, so...

MyFedora 3y ago

A bit of advice for the author: If you want to get votes for you poll, then don't require participants to subscribe to your newsletter. I see it as a waste of my time.

mid-kid 3y ago
they don't want votes, they want subscriptions to the newsletter...

ojbyrne 3y ago

As a boomer (unemployed, but who cares) I feel a connection.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

p1nkpineapple 3y ago

As a Gen Zer myself, parts of this rubbed me the wrong way in the sense that it feels like many gen X/boomers are applying the mindset that got them their success in their early life is still relevant today. We've become jaded growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in - in my home country we have massive cost of living increases, ever-nascent climate change, housing shortages and income inequality, aging population combined with policy changes that make life better for the boomer generation. Many of my peers have given up hope that they will ever be able to buy their own home. We're stressed, lonely, and are a generation of test subjects to big-tech's addiction machines. Working in tech has it's benefits and I am lucky to not be faced with many of these issues personally, but I know plenty of people my age and younger that have gone past the stage of "terrified for the world their kids will grow up in" and into a numb subsistence.

TheChaplain 3y ago
Don't worry, approaching retirement your generation will feel the heat from younger ones. They will resent you for whatever you did or didn't, and you will judge them for not understanding or (not) doing XYZ.

pmontra 3y ago

I wonder if it is really possible to compare generations across the world. In my country generations didn't even have a name until recently when 15-20 yo started talking about millenials, Z and boomers, where boomers are anybody about the age of their parents and more. Technically most of those parents are generation X, some even Y. I learned it by reading the article now. Furthermore and more importantly different social and economic dynamics mean that people of the supposed same generation are different, especially when generations span only a few years. They watch the same videos but the world around them could be significantly different. A generation in one part of the world could be more similar to the previous or the next one somewhere else. Anyway, probably all results still hold true if we think about evaluating the differences between people that entered the job market recently and colleagues that have been working for 10 or 20 years.

thefz 3y ago
> I wonder if it is really possible to compare generations across the world. I find the Gen-XYZ thing to be mostly american culture war. And sadly I think this is just another tool in their culture to create division, and of course conquer as consequence.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I kind of agree but I think that it could be an internal marketing thing, to create cohorts inside the USA to make it easier to sell every sort of stuff to them. Then it spilled internationally because of the cultural influence of the USA. I'd appreciate if anybody from the USA could tell me if my hypothesis is at least plausible. According to Wikipedia [1] "The contemporary characterization of these cohorts used in media and advertising borrows, in part, from the Strauss–Howe generational theory" but the chart over there despite being captioned as "Timeline of generations in the Western world" seems to be very USA specific given the definitions in the text that follows it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
  - thefz 3y ago
    > Then it spilled internationally because of the cultural influence of the USA. I don't know, the rare times in which I hear someone use derived terms like "boomer", they get weird looks like they are some sort of imbecile. This kind of division does not get much traction in Europe, I guess.

000ooo000 3y ago

>A note of caution: of course, it’s impossible to sum up a whole generation based on a mix of opinions from a few workplaces! Ironic that this article feels I'm the one who needs warning

tennisflyi 3y ago

> “From my old-school perspective, they are somewhat entitled, expecting flexibility, yearly raises and promotions – even when the company has no need for more managers, for example. They also expect significant benefits on top of our higher-than-market pay. > As many before me have said, they have cast off outdated expectations of ‘loyalty’ to jobs that aren't loyal to them, in return. It's admirable for the most part, though I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.” > – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US) That's been the de facto for a while and now it's just gone. Second part is wild

znpy 3y ago

"[...] I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.” – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US) See, here is the problem. If the company is increasing its earning then i want a raise too, because i contributed to that increase. And if the company is not increasing its earning i might look around because the company might not be doing so well. Due to inflation and other factors, cost of living is increasing anyway, so either way you should give out some form of raise every year (at the very least). As another millennial... GenZ'ers just got this right. I had to live through this and understand it, but it seems to be natural to them, somehow? They just got this right, and most people can (should?) only learn.

johnea 3y ago

> Some found that the GenZ were too open, insensitive, and should be more sensitive of their environment, and of people hearing what they said. This is the exact opposite of what I've found, and what other older engineers and engineering managers I personally know have found. In genreal we find GenZ to be overly sensitive to technical critisism, and unwilling to speak bluntly about technical ramifications. This point alone makes me doubt the entire article...