Idiots

Boomer: "There's a lot of books talking about how to manage Gen Y/Gen X slackers. That means there's a real problem there."
Me: "There's a lot of books about UFO's too. Does that prove there's UFO's?"

The notion of a Baby Boomer, the original "Me Generation", the generation that elected Ronald Reagan because he promised them more "Me! Me! Me!", talking about how younger people are self-indulgent narcissistic and lazy is just rich. For the record, most Boomers who were in the engineering field are no longer in the engineering field because they were self-indulgent, narcissistic, unwilling to take direction (they view it as a personal insult to their competence), and unwilling to commit the give and take needed to develop consensus in a team environment (it is always their way, or they blow up the project). They view everything as being about them personally. They have no sense of proportion and are unable to compromise. They are unwilling to solicit information from others because they feel that makes them look "weak", they'd rather do things wrong than ask a question. Given that all major engineering designs now are too large to design solo, an unwillingness to work in teams pretty much disqualifies them from modern-day engineering. Or modern-day politics, I might add -- did my description above describe an awful lot about what has happened to Washington politics over the last 18 years as the Boomers took it over?

As for the so-called "slacker" generation, they're happy to work in teams. They've been working in teams since kindergarten and know what it takes. They have a sense of proportion. They don't get their knickers out of whack because their particular pet architectural concept did not get chosen by the rest of the team as the basis of the new product, they know it's just a job, and that the other design might not be as good for some definition of "good" as their design but it's good enough, so they pitch in and make it work. (Most of engineering of complex systems is about "good enough" -- if you try to make a product "perfect", it never gets released, at least not in a timely manner that puts you in the marketplace in a competitive timeframe). They have no problem with asking their elders for suggestions or advice when you ask them to do something, and then they're happy to run with your suggestions in creative ways that result in a better product than you expected. They have exactly the same loyalty to their employer that their employer has toward them -- i.e., none, if someone approaches them with a better offer they'll leave and take it -- but that's just a recognition of reality in the modern workplace, where anybody's job can be outsourced to India or China at any given time so (shrug) gotta take what you can get before that happens. They are "lazy" in that their job is not their life and they're not going to spend 20 hours a day at work if they can avoid it, on the other hand the fact that the job is not their life is also why they have the sense of proportion that allows them to work in teams without blowing the project up. (If you don't know what "blowing the project up" is, it's hard for me to describe it, but I once came into a situation where for two years a particular project important to the company's future was caught up in an endless cycle of criticism, bickering, fault-finding, and accusations. Twelve months after that we had our first prototype of the new product, but I had to "blow up" the team and put it back together again with the proper mentality to get a product out the door to make that happen, starting from scratch with "What do we want to do, and what do we need to do in order to make it happen?" and ruthlessly droning that message over any attempt to fall back into the previous behavior -- and getting rid of people who just didn't "get it").

So what do I make of Boomers who whine about how they can't manage Gen Y types? Well, my first impulse is to hand them a mirror. My second impulse is to tell them that the problem isn't the Gen Y types. The problem is them. They confuse Gen Y types attempting to reach consensus with them as personal insults and argumentation. They view Gen Y types asking for information as whining. Their notion of "criticism" is "That sucks", and then when a Gen Y type attempts to solicit information about what sucks about his design so that he can re-do it correctly, they view it as laziness ("he wants me to do his job for him!") and insubordination ("he refuses to re-do his design correctly!"). The problem is that they're behaving exactly like a Boomer generation politician in Washington D.C., pursuing a politics of egoism that has nothing to do with actually getting a product out the door. The Gen Y types I deal with are team and results oriented. They simply aren't built to put up with bullshit of that type without turning surly and looking for another job. But if you yourself are team and results oriented, they will happily produce some of the best product you've ever seen for you. So for Boomers who whine that Gen Y types are hard to manage -- err, look in the mirror, dude. Because the problem isn't the Gen Y "slacker". The problem is a self-centered egotistical "manager" who sucks.

-- Badtux the Manager Penguin