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Another angle that makes this even more complicated is that younger people can and do get things wrong too. A fresh perspective is not automatically a correct p

by nilkn 2y ago

Another angle that makes this even more complicated is that younger people can and do get things wrong too. A fresh perspective is not automatically a correct perspective. A leader would be rightfully wary about letting someone experiencing their first transition into the workforce make major decisions about workplace design, etc. Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.

_heimdall 2y ago
I've also seen it go the other way, with leads trusting more junior engineers way more than they probably should have. I wasn't too surprised when most (all?) of the concerns that senior engineers raised and were overruled on came back to bite them 6 months later. In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.
neilv 2y ago
Also, diversity more broadly, not just generation. Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general... In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation. You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Diversity of thought should have always been the goal. That's really hard to do though, especially when you can instead focus on easily noticed external traits and claim that's diversity. Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.
otherme123 2y ago
Of course a fresh perspective is not always correct. In fact, they usually get things wrong for lack of experience. And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) and adore the latest hype. But we seniors should be open to their opinions, and we should be open to mix with them and "exploit" their strength. E.g. our social media (Twitter, Insta and Facebook mainly) are handled by a ~50 y.o. woman who volunteered. People younger than 35'ish laugh about how lengthy the posts and the videos are, and the general tone of "Buscemy: how do you do, fellow kids?", lack of social networks that are actually used, and so on. But nobody asked them for advise, because nobody wants to be told how old and out of the loop they are. On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years. Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds. SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.

by nilkn 2y ago

_heimdall 2y ago

I've also seen it go the other way, with leads trusting more junior engineers way more than they probably should have. I wasn't too surprised when most (all?) of the concerns that senior engineers raised and were overruled on came back to bite them 6 months later. In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.

neilv 2y ago

Also, diversity more broadly, not just generation. Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general... In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation. You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
_heimdall 2y ago
Diversity of thought should have always been the goal. That's really hard to do though, especially when you can instead focus on easily noticed external traits and claim that's diversity. Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.

otherme123 2y ago

Of course a fresh perspective is not always correct. In fact, they usually get things wrong for lack of experience. And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) and adore the latest hype. But we seniors should be open to their opinions, and we should be open to mix with them and "exploit" their strength. E.g. our social media (Twitter, Insta and Facebook mainly) are handled by a ~50 y.o. woman who volunteered. People younger than 35'ish laugh about how lengthy the posts and the videos are, and the general tone of "Buscemy: how do you do, fellow kids?", lack of social networks that are actually used, and so on. But nobody asked them for advise, because nobody wants to be told how old and out of the loop they are. On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years. Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.

llm_trw 2y ago
>And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds. SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.