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But the key thing about this generation is we've grown up with rapid improvements in tech, which can both lead to and require bigger, faster change than previous generations ever had to deal with (or were able to take advantage of).
What changed in an average office between 1920 and 1980? Maybe more typewriters and typists, but probably very little for people doing the work. From 1980 to 2000 things were getting quicker, with basic computers enabling word processing and a bit of spreadsheet work for ease of calculation. But since 2000 we now have superfast internet everywhere, everyone has email via laptops and smartphones, you can videoconference with 8 different people in 5 timeszones across 4 countries without even a 1-second delay. Every single one of those things is a total paradigm shift.
My standard working week looks something like:
Sunday - review and analyse a 20MB financial model in Excel, then prep and send a 10-page pdf to a client 200 miles away.
Monday - fly to Oman for a meeting with another client, having skimmed 500 pages from a lawyer in London on the flight.
Tuesday - meet with Sunday's client to prep for negotiations for a deal with a team split across Germany, France, Japan and the USA
Weds - Kuwait, for a workshop with a third client, confirm their questions, mail those to a team in the UK and get them working on it to have answers in the morning
Thursday - follow up meetings with the Kuwait client, using the responses from London from the previous day. Then fly home, and clear out any issues with clients 1 & 2 via email from the airport lounge.
I realise that's a bit more hardcore than a standard 9-5 job, but I wouldn't be able to do any of it without decent IT, which I'm not *really* provided with. But moreover, it would have been completely impossible to work like that even 10 years ago.
Now you mention it we have had an intake of twenties programmers (mostly guys but not all) and they're excellent. They're bright individuals, most work brilliantly in teams, and most of us older duffers are struggling to keep up.
Annoying.
We hired some graduates recently. One was taken on as he had an engineering degree and lots of CAD experience, and we need someone to pump out M&E layout drawings and schematics. Our Director of Fulfilment (awful job title, I know) thought it'd take about 3 months to get him up to speed.
2 weeks in he'd completed the two standard qualifications for the industry on his own (slightly quicker than I managed it, and I'd been doing it for ten years when they came out; most people take six months or so) and done a full set of accurate drawings for a live project, including some calculations by hand that most people use an online calculator for. All the way through he'd gone off and found out how to do the industry-specific stuff on his own.
Problem now is that we can't feed him work as fast as he can clear it, so he may be partly on loan to my team to help with design verification.
I know he's just one chap and not a representative sample, but his level of getting-shit-done is downright inspiring.
Problem is, as the ever-wise @Sporky alludes to, it's all anecdotal. From this random assortment I can glean that things are much the same as when I was younger and first in the workplace. Basically, in this country you start work at 16, 18, or 21-ish and don't have a clue besides a vague notion that you're to do what you're told, and remain passably civil while you're about it. If you still haven't got the jist by 17, 19, or 22-ish, then there's a problem.
In my early days I can think of two guys I worked with at the same junior level as me. One was an absolute fucking joker who thought JavaScript was 'rubbish at the top of the page' and routinely deleted it from files whenever he saw it, whether said files were his or not. I tried to lock him out of Sourcesafe (it was the 90's!) but that didn't help. No idea where he is now, not in IT would be my guess. Another fella went the other way; got some fancy-dan sketch in the City for a bit, and now lives in a palace on the Cheshire Plain (for the uninitiated, the right part of Cheshire = $$$$$).
I'm somewhere in the middle. Comparatively well-off, I live in a nice house paid for by a well-remunerated and interesting job. If you'd have seen me in the first three months of my first proper paid employment, you'd have laughed out loud at anyone who told you that's where I'd end up.
There is definitely a section of melenials who want to live vs work. I've seen some awful CVs from a retention point of view. People flitting from job to job and country to country often with big travelling gaps between work. Some are highly qualified but as a firm we need consistency. Generally my job takes 6 months to a year to learn.
That was very good. I can relate to a lot of that...
I'd argue that's true for a lot of jobs - I've been in mine for about 7 months and I'm still learning a lot.
I have a friend who flits a lot - he has found it hard to get a long term job recently, but previously he found it very ease to score temp work. Power to him, but I couldn't live like that!
The living at home until your 30's thing is probably a reflection on the jobs market/income vs housing costs, and also I think partly because a lot of millennials do seem to spend money differently than previous generations (with an emphasis on experiences rather than a great compulsion to own a house).
(I say this as a 30 year old who has been a homeowner since I was 26, but I think I'm more of an exception rather than the rule)
It's easy for us to look at ourselves and think that we're at a cutting edge of change so sharp and radical that nothing like it has ever been seen before, but, I'd suggest that just about every generation has gone through a similarly sharp and radical change. It might not seem much to us, now, from our perspective, but at the time, it was - I'd wager - just as earth-shattering as our experiences today.
Previous changes have been generated by events like WW1/WW2, or the '29 crash & subsequent depression, or (for the UK) by the end of the empire, or (etc). Social change. The nose-in-the-phone generation might believe that there was no change pre-tech, but that's a little blinkered, probably because all they see/recgonise/value is tech.
As for tech change, I agree that the internet has changed things considerably, but it's largely - IMHO - in terms of doing more or faster, rather than doing a lot better. Looking at your "typical week", there's a lot of activity going on, but, to be blunt, "so what"? There's also a lot of wasted time and effort in travel, and whereas you're jumping on and off planes, that's really little different (other than in distance travelled) from jumping on and off trains, in and out of cars, or on and off a horse.
If the internet had really changed things, you'd be VR conferencing, not travelling.
Biggest change in the working environment since the '80s?
I think one was tech related (the introduction of the PC) and one was social related (the end of "job for life"). But that's probably because I lived through those and experienced them, so they're the main things that I saw the effect of.
Re the millennials? They've grown up being told that they're special, so of course they have a sense of entitlement now. Society generally seems to treat children as miracles to be protected and deified rather than the continuation of something that's happened for millennia.
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
Wasn't it always that way?
Different words, different ages, same process
It's lovely that some folk here are working with the talented amongst the new generation, but believe me...that's far from the whole story.
I have a compatible VC codec on my laptop. On my desk.
On the upside I was about £60 up on the mileage allowance and had a nice day listening to Spotify in the car.
On the downside the coffee was crap.
Lovely chap too.
Gary, age 50.
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.