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?"
Age (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound 22.
Good for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning new stuff is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
When the older guys have kids and a family, spending all their energy on work can be hard. Older people should have experience, younger people should have drive. Working together, you can get amazing things done.
Not just age (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of people who do not perform well in their jobs, for various reasons. Age may be a red herring, as I've seen the behavior you describe in both old people and young people. (I was 19 when I started my career, so it is not "needless to say" that you are the youngest in your office. I am 34 now.)
I recommend that you not waste time psychoanalyzing your coworkers for underperforming. Instead, I recommend you take exploit your willingness to get to the bottom of things and simply earn a reputation for being the guy who can actually fix things. This will pay off in $$$, or should, if you handle it right. Alternatively, blaming your coworkers' failure to do this on age, or even fixating on that issue at all, is likely to earn you a reputation for being a cocky and arrogant young jerk that nobody wants to work with. Remember, I was 19. Don't do it. :)
If you have this level of attention to detail, one thing you might want to watch out for later on is a perfectionism that might cause you to obsess about investigating things even when there is no payoff. Watch out for letting yourself get trapped into jobs that don't have a payoff, whether that payoff be in monetary or in some other type of satisfaction. It's okay to work for a reward besides money; it's not okay to let yourself obsess and waste time that could be spent doing something you like better or that brings you better rewards.
A book I recommend for you is Leadership and Self-deception. The format is "business parable," which always comes off as silly and preachy, but the concepts in it are sound and useful as you discover and deal with mental blocks on the job, in others and also in yourself.
Woof (Score:5, Insightful)
I am 37 years of age. I, evidently (and spuriously) enjoy the usage of too much extraneous, needless, and unnecessary punctuation; however, I'd like to relate a little story to you.
My co-worker, not much older than you, has absolutely no idea how to use the command line. He doesn't know what Perl is, or Bash. To his credit, he can write a little SQL, but we worked together on something recently that took us an hour to fix after he'd banged his head against it for a couple of days. It's okay, it takes time to learn shit.
You solved a problem your coworkers didn't. Good for you! You deserve a pat on the head for a job well done. IT is a field where all colleagues benefit from sharing and learning from one another. It's not an age thing. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you can appreciate it.
Be disruptive, sure, but be polite about it (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always been the disruptive influence, everywhere I've worked. I don't like answers like, "that's just the way we've always done it", they've never gone over well with me.
That said, you have to learn how to do it politely. You are still going to annoy people, but generally people feel good doing the best job they can. The folks that really don't like you...well, they aren't worth worrying about.
It's not age that matters - it's adaptability. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm one of the OLDEST in my department, yet I'm the one who learns new tech the quickest. In a previous job, it was invariably the older/experienced techs in the department that could pick up new stuff quickly, simply because they've been "picking up new stuff quickly" for a couple decades, whereas the recent high school/college gratuate whose first computer at age 4 was more powerful than my first computer post-college never had to learn arcane things, they've always been 'easy'.
Yet yes, there were/are young 'uns who are perfectly adaptable.
Age DOESN'T matter. It's just that most of the 'adaptable' older IT workers have 'adapted out' of front-line IT by now, so it's the less-adaptable ones you young 'uns see in the front lines.
Re:Age (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. Drop the attitude, and focus on doing your job. If you're truly better than everyone else then it will show. If you run around with your nose in the air telling everybody else how great you are then you'll be kicking rocks down the road in no time flat. In other words, grow up and worry about yourself.
Re:Good for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Horrid advice.
Re:Good for you. (Score:3, Insightful)
So he managed to twiddle with a BIOS. Big fat hairy deal. There's nothing "new" about that. It's just a basic systems integration issue. It's nothing that anyone that has built boxes or installed an OS hasn't already seen before.
It's not really that special and neither is the annoying twit.
Beyond this kid being obnoxious, age doesn't seem to be the issue here.
Humility and Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
I was like you when I started working in IT (oddly enough at the age of 22), I'm 35 now and the best advice I can give you is do amazing things with humility and always try to see things from others point of view before jumping into action. And yes, it's not easy because at the core most geeks tend to want to act on problems right away.
I ripped into everything, always trying to show that "things could get done if you put your mind to it". The trouble is you start to learn that some battles aren't worth the effort no matter how interesting because you will eventually have more important things to do. If I got a load of servers out of the box that didn't work I'd send 'em back for alternatives that did, not because I can't spend the time to figure out why they don't work but because I got bigger things to worry about.
From a social perspective you may start to put barriers in front of yourself by working around people instead of with them, solve problems right but careful of stepping on toes. Having people resent you is way worse than busted hardware!
Re:OOH, Ageism from the kid! (Score:4, Insightful)
Old age is a protected status in the US.
FTFY.
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.
Re:You reek of fresh awesomesness. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who wants to have a beer with those people?
I prefer beer with people who are actually interesting.
Don't be a dick (Score:5, Insightful)
And for fuck's sake cut the old guys some slack. They probably know all kinds of obscure shit about making boot disks, compiling the OS from source, mainframe backups, configuring zfs, or whatever new and exciting knowledge there was to glean for IT workers back when they were 22.
Re:Good for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not just age (Score:5, Insightful)
Call it what it is: the guy is ageist.
This is textbook ageism. Coworkers are douchbags and all older than him, so he assumes it is *because* they are older since that is the stereotype. Then he extrapolates that to be a sign that all older people are dinosaurs and obsolete.
I'm 32, by the way. Old enough to be discriminated against?
Re:Age (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only could no one else get it, they all moaned and complained "we never had to do that before" after he showed them.
So not only are they unwilling to adapt on their own, they seem to take umbrage at being shown something new.
Re:Lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
There are idiots in every profession, certainly. However, in IT, and this may be just my perception because of my familiarity with the industry, they seem to coagulate in certain locations much more than any other industry.
Possibly the good ones, especially the ones with the rational type "anti-idiocy" personality types, quit and move on when they've got to deal with idiots on a daily basis, so the business hires someone to replace him. This continues until the business' IT dept is staffed by nothing but idiots.
In short, xTrashcat shouldn't plan on getting too comfortable in this job, because dealing with this style of coworker continually might just drive him off the deep end.
The fact that they were trying a standard, existing image on entirely new hardware tells me that they're not paddling with all oars to begin with. This is usually a recipe for a BSOD, and even if you can get it working, you've got a bunch of old driver cruft, which slows down the machine.
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
From TFA:
But do you know WHY that setting was that important?
The best admins learn that tweaking individual machines is a fast way to burn out. Standardization is best. Even if it means that some systems are considered "defective" because they don't meet the standard.
Re:Learning new stuff is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning new stuff is hard? Really?
I'm 37, with 3 kids, 6, 2-almost-3, and 3 months. I'm always looking into new things I can learn, because I enjoy it. Do I manage as much as I did before kids? No, but I still do some. I consider it a hobby. Pretty much everybody has a hobby outside of playing with their kids, and this is no different.
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, it's rather simple. Being able to Google does not make you an architect or engineer, and it does not mean that someone else is lacking. Architecture and Engineering requires wisdom, which is not something you get with Google. Quite the contrary, spending so much time fishing for random bullshit reduces your wisdom.
Let me explain that statement a bit: Goodie that you can Google an answer, fish for a few minutes in a BIOS and fix a problem. It's not an exceptional event, and the fact that you had to do that means that your people complaining may be correct. You pay vendors and data center people to perform tasks, and the vendor in this case failed to provide what they are contracted to do. You fixing it does not correct the problem, so who knows what you get in your next batch of servers? Will you be able to find the next BIOS setting that's messed up? How about someone else finds the problem, and you look like a tool since it's something you think makes you special?
When I was your age, I knew that I was smart and invaluable. 10 years later, I learned how big of an idiot I was, and 10 years after that I repeated that thought process. Experience is where wisdom comes from, and being able to zoom out and see the bigger picture comes with that wisdom. Right now, you are proud that you can put a Band Aide on something, later you may be able to actually solve problems and design solutions.
Google does not make someone smart. In fact the opposite has been proven over and over. It inhibits your memory from working properly and makes fact sorting extremely difficult. Sure, I use it as a tool at times but rely on experience wisdom and instinct much more than Google. No, I'm not going to cite anything, go google it you lazy bastards!
Lastly never rate people by how smart you think you are, but rather what they believe they are smart at. You will learn a whole lot more that way, and probably get along much better with people.
Re:Lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that xTrashcat is missing is the contrary point of view:
Dear Slashdot,
Where I work, I'm the only one with a decade of experience under my belt. My coworkers constantly advocate using the newest, hippest tech without any concern for how well it's been proven to work. Our production environment constantly crashes and we've had many nights where we've had to pour over core dumps to figure out what's going wrong. The developers that work on these projects have been friendly, but ultimately unable to produce a stable product. How do I get my coworkers to realize that if we step back from the bleeding edge, we'll end up getting cut a lot less often?
There's two sides to the story. As xTrashcat gets older, he'll realize that learning is great, but so is sleeping through the night. There's a balance to be struck between using cool new technology and using tried-and-true, proven technology. At 22, he doesn't have the experience yet to see the wisdom of the latter path. He seems to be working with a group of people who are all to old, jaded and unwilling to learn to see the virtue in the former path. He should either a) try to learn from the wisdom of his coworkers without losing his zeal for learning (could be hard and frustrating) or b) go work with a bunch of other 20-somethings and learn those same lessons the hard way. This will be more work, less frustrating and result in earning less money.
Re:Age (Score:3, Insightful)
You remind me of myself when I was 22. Good luck with that.
Re:Try to get First Post on Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking about basic level IT support people. A monkey trained to hit a simple, repetitive sequence on keys could get first post on Slashdot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course age is not the issue. Some of the most flexibly-minded people I know are in their 70s and 80s and some of the most rigid thinkers are twenty-something.
The fact that he tells this story about his workplace, and then comes away thinking the whole thing is about age shows just how much he has yet to learn.
He might as well have put the same question regarding the race or nationality or gender of his co-workers. It's BS in any regard. Age is not the issue. Wisdom, patience, insight do not get used up. In fact, the longer and more often you use them, the more likely you are to have a full supply.
There is a certain wisdom (Score:5, Insightful)
That comes with age. There's also a certain level of need to just get stuff done. At a certain point USING knowledge becomes the overriding concern, and you have so many tools in your toolbox that one more becomes less and less useful. You also begin to find that there's very little that is really new under the Sun in most fields. As a software engineer I see fads in languages, dev tools, databases, etc, and hear all about how some new guy is sure that it is a whole new revolutionary better way to do stuff. Often some new tool IS useful, but it is also often something that existed 30 years ago that everyone has just sort of forgotten about and it got renamed/reinvented and we long ago learned what its limitations were and moved on to other things (probably when we were 24 or so...).
There's also a certain factor of luck in terms of poking around at stuff. Yeah, you did debug something in a snap, which is good, congrats. OTOH I might look over your shoulder tomorrow and spot something you missed too. I don't know the guys you work with, but they probably managed before. Maybe they're bumblers, and maybe they just missed something. Ironically the more secure you become in your knowledge the easier it can be to miss some small detail that you 'know'. Today I was totally thwarted by some stupid piece of bad design in python that caused a webapp I was deploying to balk at reading a file. My associate figured it out, somehow. Python's split() function is just stupidly designed. Being an old Perl guy from way back I assumed NOBODY could be that stupid, but yes they can! He doesn't know perl from beans and thus less knowledge = solution. Ironic, but it goes that way sometimes.
One thing is for sure. I learned back around 26 not to be cocky, lol. That's a danger to avoid. Maybe I'm hot shit, but I never ever speak ill of anyone or brag about anything nowadays. It works. Only the VERY best of the best get away with the cocky routine for long... ;) (not saying you're cocky, just remember not to get that way).
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy you were responding to is a mouthy idiot. I've been doing this for 20 years, and I would want to work with someone who is willing to learn more, rather than say "oh, we have a service contract and someone else will take care of it".
In the past, I have given away old equipment to my team so that they can take it home and learn how to network, etc etc, and out of a team of 10, 2 came back with processes that helped improve our workflow. You sound like one of those two, and that's a pretty good thing.
Learn everything you can. Though, you will also have to learn to delegate and let go sometimes, if it's another department's responsibility. In that case, learn diplomacy and how to help them learn to improve any specific things, by making it appear it's their idea, etc etc.
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy gave one example of being able to fix something, and said he Google's everything so he can to know as much as he can. At 20 that mind set probably sounds good. I have been at the game for 25 years, and was similar when I started. I learned over times that process and procedure is critical, not the one off solutions that I can provide. It's not a quick jump and honestly it took years and years to get that way. As others mentioned being burned by, and burned out by, having to support all the bullshit that people request takes a toll. That does not mean I don't learn or do new things, but rather I have enough wisdom to discern a solution from a fix. There is a huge difference, and it takes a long time to learn the difference in most cases.
I don't think it's bad to be excited about a job, or when people want to learn. What I'm concerned with is the mind set that because he can Google he is smart, and worse the people he works with are stupid and lazy because they are not like him.
Re:Try to get First Post on Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the deal, "xTrashcat." You are about to read several hundred posts here that explain why you're young, why you're an idiot, and why you need to just keep your head down and follow process and not rock the boat.
F**k these people.
Yes, you're young; and yes, you don't get what it's like to be in the trenches for many years. And yes, you also don't understand why ad hoc but smart answers may not be scalable and thus turn out to bite you in the butt.
But you know what? You seem to like your job and have enthusiasm for it. Maybe that will last, maybe it won't. But if you do keep that enthusiasm, you will never be one of the people responding to your post and telling you what a stupid a**hole you are for trying to fix a problem without shipping the boxes back to the vendor, telling the users to fill out the XP-239 form in-quadruplicate, and taking a smoke break.
And you know what? Liking your job and wanting to always be learning new things as a result will make you much, much happier than all the people telling you how stupid you are. Also, with that attitude - you may end up being the boss of those people, and they will be complaining on Slashdot 10 years from now about how their PHB always wants them to learn things and fix stuff but "it's not their job"... so please keep it up. The world needs more people who actually like their jobs and try hard to do them well.
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
I am exactly twice your age and I run across similar issues with people. From experience, let me tell you this:
Take a group of 12 people. Out of that 12, 4 will be "adventurous" in their thinking and 8 will not be. Of those 4 "adventurous" people, 2 will not be satisfied with a surface answer and will almost always dig deeper.
If the percentages you are seeing are not like this, you are in an abnormal group.
Do not denigrate the group of 8. They are necessary for stability against the chaos that the group of 4 will cause from time to time. Their focus is different than yours but it is valuable.
It sounds like you are one of the 2 that will not accept surface answers. Be very careful. You are an agent of chaos and you will get fired. You are outnumbered and the group of 8 will likely denigrate you even though you are just as necessary as they are. You bring about change.
Be humble and be smart and you will go far. Be arrogant and smart and you will starve. You (and I) are nothing without others.
Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't judge the people around you, learn from them.
Learning helplessness is bad advice.
You clearly weren't paying enough attention. He wasn't simply suggesting that the OP follow their path or do what they say unquestioningly. "Learn from them" was meant in the more intelligent sense where one can learn from both good and bad examples. In particular, he comments:-
It is a good idea to find people who you want to emulate and to look up to, but it can be even more valuable to find people around you whose fate you are desperate to avoid and try to discern what happened then don't do that. [my emphasis]
Yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds to me like the others had their reasons for not liking the boxes, and the trouble with the XP install was just a convenient excuse to dump them, til Smartass McGee came along and "fixed" things for them. Now they're stuck with the shit boxes they really should have returned for something better.