this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I will be honest as a late GenX it's going to be interesting as my cohort retires because we were the last generation to remember before The Internet and grew up to understand the technology not just use it.
If you're my age or older please make sure you're teaching your young coworkers how to break things and put them back together without the aid of all the tools and resources they have at their fingertips now. Creativity thrives in adversity. Creativity is at risk when tools like ChatGPT are at their fingertips now.
/rant
Get off your high horse old man. Millennials were born into technology, molded by it. We live and breathe it, and also grew up in a world where things most definitely did not just work.
I think you significantly underestimate the ingenuity and problem solving abilities of the younger generations. My Gen Z coworkers are extremely smart and hard working and understand how things work just as well, if not better than older generations.
I said nothing about the ingenuity and problem solving. That's not the concern. I also didn't take any exception on work ethic or intelligence. You're putting words in my mouth.
I never said that you said those things. You said you were the last generation to understand technology and not just use it, which is quite frankly ridiculous and untrue - especially for anyone with work ethic and intelligence.
I think they mean that they were the last generation who was alive and learning about how things were built and innovated on, while newer generations won't have that benefit.
They will be exposed to high level tools instead that automate a lot of the work which will make things easier for them but reduce understanding.
Thus, the newer generations on average will need to purposefully dig back into the past to learn what the older generations learned by just being around while it was happening.
These are just general trends though, its not going to be very practical to try to apply it to any individuals, or the group of people you work with.
Yeah, the tools are still there to figure out the low level shit, information on it has never been this easy to come by and bright people who are interested will still get there.
However growing up during a time you were forced to figure the low level details of tech out merely to get stuff to work, does mean that if you were into tech back then you definitely became bit of a hacker (in the traditional sense of the word) whilst often what people consider as being into tech now is mainly spending money on shinny toys were everything is already done for you.
Most people who consider themselves as being "into Tech" don't really understand it to significant depth because they never had to and only the few who actually do want to understand it at that level enough to invest time into learning it do.
I'm pretty sure the same effect happened in the early days vs later days of other tech, such as cars.
The comparison to cars is interesting, although cars maybe have peaked already and I doubt technology has.
I dont think proprietary information is helping much either. Makes young folk think they need to get a job at Google to work on something real and important.
On the nose. Thank you for explaining it far more eloquently than I was able to.