Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology? 515
xTrashcat writes "I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname 'Google' because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information. Being 22, it is, I speculate, needless to say that I am the youngest of my coworkers. If there is a piece of software, hardware, a technique, etc., I want to know everything about it. On the contrary, nearly all of my coworkers resent it and refuse to even acknowledge it, let alone learn about it. For example, we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7. A few months later, we decide that a computer lab was going to get an XP image instead of Win7. After several days worth of attempts, none of our XP images, even our base, would work, and it left everyone scratching their heads. We were on the verge of returning thousands of dollars worth of machines because they were 'defective.' I was not satisfied. I wanted to know why they weren't working instead of just simply returning them, so I jumped into the project. After almost 30 seconds of fishing around in BIOS, I noticed that UEFI was enabled. Switched it to legacy, and boom; problem solved. My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes. So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
Try to get First Post on Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
That will prove you are qualified.
google (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, they call you Google because we have to wade through a lot of garbage to get to the relevant data when you speak.
(That summary was 3 times as long as necessary.)
You reek of fresh awesomesness. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OOH, Ageism from the kid! (Score:5, Funny)
As someone who has, many times, been told I was turned down for a position because I was "just too young," I can promise you that people under 65 enjoy no such protection.
FTR, I'm still under 30.
That means you lack experience, not that you're too young.
Now go refill this coffee. No cream, no sugar.
Re:Age (Score:0, Funny)
I'd rather have you work for me... most people here are idiots. They don't give two shits about the work they do. I love my job. I'm also the boss and CEO though! GOD I hated the 2 month Internship I did at a company I liked. All because they were umm fucking idiots working there who couldn't get jack shit accomplished. The company is gone now.... and well... I'm doing what they should have done. We are the success and they well... failed.
Re:Learning new stuff is hard (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Age (Score:5, Funny)
Nah - he sounds like the 20-something MIS interns that we get... the running joke in the technical departments at my company is that if they lost access to Google they wouldn't know how to breathe, closely followed by the belief that if we cut off their Facebook access on the corporate network we'd get an immediate 50% drop in network traffic, followed by a brief spike in productivity until the withdrawal symptoms became too severe.
Re:Not just age (Score:5, Funny)
Old people tend to ask you (and not usually politely) where something is when they're actually standing right in front of it.
I worked retail in a bookstore. At the time of this story I was the bookbuyer for the store I worked for. I was out at the customer service desk looking up something in a source that was kept there. This took me about 15 minutes. While I was doing this a young man 16-18 was standing looking at the shelves next to the customer service desk. He appeared to be reading the spines of the books. The section he was looking at was the Science Fiction section. Since I love Science Fiction and am a voracious reader, when I was finished what I was working on, I asked him if I could help him find something. He asked me where the Science Fiction section was. I thought he was joking since he had just spent 5-10 minutes apparently reading the spines of the books in the Science Fiction section. He wasn't. He was just standing there pretending to read the spines until someone offered him assistance.
In short, age has nothing to do with it.
Re:Lucky (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but what was it you poured over the core dumps?
Re:Learning new stuff is hard (Score:2, Funny)
If you feed them they'll give you a core dump.
Re:The question paints the asker in a pretty light (Score:4, Funny)
Dunning and Kruger rated themselves way too high.