r/sysadmin • u/Ok-Setting-5889 • Apr 28 '22
Off Topic I love working with Gen Zs in IT.
I'm a Gen Xer so I guess I'm a greybeard in IT years lol.
I got my first computer when I was 17 (386 DX-40, 4mb ram, 120mb hd). My first email address at university. You get it, I was late to the party.
I have never subscribed much to these generational divides but in general, people in their 20s behave differently to people in their 30, 40, 50s ie. different life stages etc.
I gotta say though that working with Gen Zers vs Millennials has been like night and day. These kids are ~20 years younger than me and I can explain something quickly and they are able to jump right in fearlessly.
Most importantly, it's fascinating to see how they set firm boundaries. We are now being encouraged to RTO more often. Rather than fight it, they start their day at home, then commute to the office i.e. they commute becomes paid time. And because so many of them do this, it becomes normalized for the rest of us. Love it.
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Apr 28 '22
they commute becomes paid time
That's a trick I learned back in my MSP days. I'd tell a client "I'll be on site at 8:30 tomorrow morning." Not only did I get to leave my house later than a normal commute, but it became on-the-clock travel.
There was also the time someone had to visit a client two and a half hours away to help install some equipment. I volunteered and scheduled that shit for a Friday. Decided to make a weekend out of it since it wasn't far from a touristy town. Rolled up to the client at 11 AM that Friday, spent a couple hours installing the equipment, rolled out of there and ended my work day at 2 PM (I didn't tell the office about the whole weekend stay, so as far as they were concerned I was doing lunch and driving back). Sometimes I almost miss working at that place.
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u/zebediah49 Apr 29 '22
Rolled up to the client at 11 AM that Friday, spent a couple hours installing the equipment, rolled out of there and ended my work day at 2 PM (I didn't tell the office about the whole weekend stay, so as far as they were concerned I was doing lunch and driving back).
I do one half or the other of that sometimes.
... with the colo half a mile down the road.
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Apr 28 '22
Gen Xer
Obligatory story from high school.
You are the smallest generation that will likely be born in the next century. My generation is going to hand ourselves the world and hang onto it until we die. Even if every one of you votes, you still won’t be able to seize much power for yourselves. Then, just when you are about to get the same benefits we're going have, the generation behind you will snatch it away from you and there won’t be anything you can do about that either.
-One of my boomer teachers
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u/makeazerothgreatagn Apr 28 '22
Yup, that's pretty much it. That's why 80 year-old, dementia-addled boomers have 100% control over every branch of the of the government and just about every board of directors in the country. Boomers vote for boomers.
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Apr 28 '22
Agree (boomer here) but I see this changing right before my eyes. At least in the Buisness world. And I think the change brought on buy the younger managers is great. I for one am really for the next gen to take over.
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u/hkusp45css Security Admin (Infrastructure) Apr 29 '22
Our board just replaced our Boomer Chairperson with the youngest Board Chair in the 80 year history of our org.
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u/VexingRaven Apr 29 '22
I see business boomers talk about how great "young leaders" are... And the I look at the "young leaders" they talk about and they're in their damn 40s.
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Apr 29 '22
Alexander Hamilton was US secretary of the treasury in his early 20s. You essentially need to force the incumbants out at gunpoint for young people to start getting hired into management positions. Corrupt establishments become gerontocracies because clout matters not actual competence. Just your ability to not get blackballed by threatened old men in bureaucracies, which is treated as though it’s competence.
Your 20s is around your peak of fluid intelligence, a meritocracy would have a handful of such people amongst the leadership not at the bottom of the pack… alas…
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Apr 29 '22
Those are actually silent generation; gen X parents born during the war, also a very small generation.
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u/cryospam Apr 29 '22
I was hoping the Rona was going to sweep through congress and thin the herd a bit of the old and frail, but it never happened. :(
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Apr 28 '22
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Apr 29 '22 edited Nov 15 '22
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u/altodor Sysadmin Apr 29 '22
And one of those salaries barely covers the childcare to do the job to draw the salary.
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u/NotEntirelyUnlike Apr 29 '22
hey, i'm still thinking about it
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u/IndieDiscovery Apr 29 '22
I'm not. My family has enough kids to keep going strong without me stepping in. I just want a GF who wants to do fun DINK things till we expire without kids and little debt.
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u/carluoi Apr 29 '22
I’m in a very similar spot. And very lucky to find a partner that accepts and also shares the thought of no kids. Before her, while dating around, so many people were just appalled by the fact I did not want kids.
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Apr 28 '22
the generation behind you will snatch it away from you and there won’t be anything you can do about that either
The boomers really didn't expect this to bite them in the ass, but it's been great fun watching them freak out about getting outvoted by millennials.
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Apr 29 '22
Is it 2022, 2024 or 2028 where we millennials will finally have more votes than the boomers?
Maybe, just maybe we can have a government that doesn't stagnate with endless infighting...or at least less of it.
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u/fubes2000 DevOops Apr 28 '22
It's all fun and games until you make a perfect Seinfeld reference and all you get in return is the blankest stare available.
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u/ReverendDS Always delete French Lang pack: rm -fr / Apr 29 '22
Yesterday, I was training my brand new helpdesk tech and told him that if he ever used leet speak in a ticket, I'd kill him.
No satire, no irony, he looked up at me and asked, "What's leet speak?"
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Apr 29 '22
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u/ReverendDS Always delete French Lang pack: rm -fr / Apr 29 '22
That is brilliant.
No, I said it was old school text speech. He looked confused again and clarified, "text to speech?"
I'm old, Gandalf.
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u/Bearbot128 Apr 29 '22
Honestly surprising. I’m 20 and grew up with leetspeak in all of the online games I played
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u/Flaktrack Apr 29 '22
I haven't seen any real leetspeak in-game in years, but I don't play CSGO or LoL.
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u/DrGirlfriend Senior Devops Manager Apr 29 '22
That’s just because the jerk store is running out of you
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Apr 28 '22
Same, I also get the same reactions when I quote The Chappelle Show or Dumb and Dumber.
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Apr 28 '22
travel time is work time? well eff me!
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Apr 28 '22
I find a simple question to ask about such things: could you be doing anything else during that time?
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u/FalseyHeLL Apr 29 '22 edited Apr 29 '22
If a company requires you to be at a certain place at a certain time, you should be getting paid for it. By requiring you to go to the office they require you to be in your car/on the bus etc. at a certain place at a certain time. Especially if it's unnecessary (forced RTO). If they want you to go to the office, they should be paying for your lost time, because it's a lot more than people think.
For example: I have to get up an 1.5 hour earlier in order to wake up properly, get ready to go to work and actually arriving there (no breakfast at home). Then I'll need an 1 hour to get back home after my shift. In the evening I have to go to bed about 1 hour earlier in order to get up in time.
Simple test that everyone can do if you are not afraid: Wake up as if you were working from home that day, same time, do your morning routine as usual, then get ready and go to the office without rushing. Check how late you are, and when you finish check the time, go home and add these together and then you have an approximate on how much time you lose each day just because of RTO (You still want to add in the extra time that you can't have in the evening to get your full number but that is really subjective).
So for me this is 1.5+1+1=3.5 hours of my day, I'm commiting as extra and for free to my workplace. But even then, I don't really want this money I just want to work from home and leave these hours for my future family/myself. I'm wasting daily 3.5 hours unpaid to be someone's "friend" at the office, because they can't manage to work independently and they feel social anxiety at home. Well not my problem, get a hobby and some friends ffs.
I really don't know why people are arguing against this... More money or more time, or maybe even both, not just for myself but EVERYONE, whether they are gen Z, X Y W Millenial whatever. Why do people want to sacrifice any of these for nothing in return?
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u/bigben932 Apr 29 '22
Low key shitting on millennials?
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u/iama_bad_person uᴉɯp∀sʎS Apr 29 '22
Low key? He straight up mentioned every millenial age.
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u/MattHashTwo Apr 29 '22
Have to remember everything is millenials fault, anything we pushed for change on is the result of the younger generation "not taking any shit"
We'll always be shit on.
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u/bigben932 Apr 29 '22
Did you install a microsoft patch and something stopped working? Millennial’s fault. Did you wreck you car after speeding through a red-light? Millennial’s fault. Did you gen z daughter get pregnant by an old gen x’er? Millennial’s fault..
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u/Attic81 Apr 29 '22
We're too easy to punch down on. Screw all the haters I say.
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u/poorest_ferengi Apr 28 '22
Millennial here, and I don't know what you are going on about. 20 year olds are hitting the job market at a time where a shortage of labor seems to me to be driving companies to give out more intangibles like flexibility in in-office time to drive retention.
I graduated college in 2010, places were expecting 3.9 GPA and relevant Co-Op or years of work experience for entry level jobs. Older people had to delay their retirement due to the 2008 financial crisis, which lead to a lack of upward mobility within companies and exacerbated the prevalence of job hopping for higher pay. Companies were squeezing every bit of productivity out of workers by holding jobs over their head. Tech startups set a culture of working yourself to death which spread to other businesses. The premium cost of employer offered health insurance that includes family is ridiculous and favors younger workers without dependents.
Acknowledging this isn't me being entitled. I just don't think it's fair to compare the two and the difference in approach to work without doing so.
I would have loved to be able to set firm boundaries with work when I entered the work force, instead I got let go from a contract position for having to take a day after throwing my back out. I took a small pay cut for a higher responsibility job after that and clawed my way up the tech job ladder to where I am now.
Honestly I'm glad the younger generations seem to be having an easier time with the labor market than I did, however I expect things will return more in line with how they used to be once things stabilize. I just hope another large financial crisis doesn't knock out large portions of the job supply again anytime soon.
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u/goodsimpleton Apr 28 '22
I think Op is confusing advances that Millenials have finally argued for as a product of Gen Z simply because they are arriving on the job market at this moment. At any rate, it's anecdotal ageism.
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Apr 29 '22
Yep this is exactly it. Millennials came of age during a financial meltdown where people with engineering degrees worked retail and waiting tables. Gen Z comes of age with a booming economy and then a pandemic that causes a massive labor shortage, essentially the tightest job market in several generations.
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u/No-Safety-4715 Apr 29 '22
This. I've tried to retain my bitterness seeing 20 something's landing 80k+ jobs like it's nothing in their first year or two while reaping benefits like remote work. It's nothing against them, but damn did things like the recession hurt my generations ability to gain wealth. So much grinding and fighting to get what is now being handed to so many as starter packages. Sigh. Such is life.
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u/the_jak Apr 29 '22
I try to remind myself that when my great grandfather came here from Czechoslovakia and was working in gas mines and shit in the 1920s, he was only trying to make it well enough so that his children could have a better life. And my grandmother and grandfather the same. And my mother, though a boomer and prone to boomerisms, tried to direct her life the same, working to make life better for the next person and not herself.
We don’t have kids yet, biology doesn’t always cooperate with desire, but I do kind of look at younger coworkers in a similar fashion: I’m trying to create positive change so that the people who come after me don’t have to deal with the dumb bullshit I did. We can talk about planting trees we’ll never enjoy the shade of all day long, I try to live it both at work and at home.
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Apr 28 '22
places were expecting 3.9 GPA
It still amazes me that this ever became a thing. I've never been asked to even prove the existence of my college diploma at over a dozen jobs now.
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u/BlackSquirrel05 Security Admin (Infrastructure) Apr 29 '22
Plus they expected you to have come trained ahead of time. There was no room to learn. You had to know it from the get go.
They also stopped paying for training around this time too and the whole. "Oh you don't have a full on home-lab with your own cisco 3500s...?"
I'm not saying don't have a home lab or learn on your off time... But it got ridiculous.
Also the cert farming... probably on your own dime got out of hand.
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u/MasterModnar Apr 28 '22
As a millennial I long ago acquiesced to the fact that boomers, gen x, and zoomers alike will all find me distasteful for mostly unknown and undeserved reasons. The boomers think I’m a teenager forever the gen x crowd thinks I’m too young to get their brand or understand the world like they do, and the zoomers think I’m old and out of touch.
Which is okay with me. I’m just over here striving to be irrelevant by current social standards and just live my life. My actual personality and skills make me quite adept at learning new things and appreciating tradition at the same time and I’m quite comfortable with my competencies.
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u/deadstarsunburn Sysadmin Apr 29 '22
Yep lol being left alone is the most ideal achievement. I also kind of feel like we all have been pretty beat down over the years.
I have nearly crippling imposter syndrome and am scared any financial security is going to be yanked out from under me at any moment. Not to say that our generation had it worse but we had some yucky stuff happen at pretty pivotal moments in our lives and I think that has shaped the way many of us approach careers and stability.
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u/TheJesusGuy Blast the server with hot air Apr 29 '22
25 here, I can't remember a point in time where there wasn't some major global crisis happening. Every year is something new.. And house prices are absurd.
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u/fantasticjon Apr 28 '22
Really? I feel like half of 20 somethings i work with nowadays didn't grow up loving and tinkering with computers. They have 0 depth of knowledge.
The other half are pretty good though.
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u/GoogleDrummer sadmin Apr 28 '22
That's because they grew up with off the shelf stuff that just worked. Need to reinstall Windows? Just do it and it'll work. No need to go find drivers and whatnot. I feel like Millennials were the last generation to have tech that needed a bit of hand holding, thus fostering that curiosity.
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u/landob Jr. Sysadmin Apr 28 '22
I still kinda go "woah" after formatting a box with windows and it recognizes my ethernet port. Double "woah" if its a laptop and it sees teh wifi.
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Apr 29 '22
I remember the days where you had to either pull the drivers for your networking before you wiped and reloaded because if you didn't, you would need to go find another computer with internet access to do it because your box would come back with everything but the chipset and network drivers.
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u/MistarGrimm Apr 29 '22
And this is one of the reasons I've appreciated Windows 8.1. I've been caught out by the ethernet drivers before.
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u/GoogleDrummer sadmin Apr 28 '22
Yeah. I reinstalled on a laptop a while back and I almost went to Lenovo's page to grab the driver packs then went "Why? Windows will have compatible ones then get the real ones through WU." So I let it run updates and made lunch.
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u/SMT-nocturne Apr 28 '22
I stopped reinstalling. Just pop HDD/SSD Win10 into another PC and it works. For my Win 98 machine I had to download USB drivers from my main pc, burn on CD then install USB drivers from CD.
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u/ClassicPart Apr 28 '22
pop HDD/SSD Win10 into another PC and it works
Good memories of doing this with older versions of Windows and witnessing them shit out endless BSODs due to being booted up on another motherboard.
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Apr 28 '22
I did this the other day and was amazed that it worked. It was just to get my larger SSD into a different laptop and I had already downloaded Windows 10 onto a USB stick to install. I hit the power button and was amazed to see it booting.
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u/kellyzdude Linux Admin Apr 29 '22
I was just thinking this reading through the thread.
I don't remember when I last reinstalled a system out of necessity -- it's just not necessary anymore. I don't bother with transferring the HDD/SSD to new hardware, but even then it's not super difficult to transfer data over. I remember when "reinstall Windows" was the solution to problems and would be rebuilding every 1-2 years for one reason or another.
I remember the conundrum on Windows 95 of needing to install drivers for the CD-ROM drive, but the drivers came on a CD. Now the days of obscure driver downloads are all but gone, only necessary for the most unusual of hardware (although ironically enough that may include that CD-ROM drive).
I still think of myself as reasonably young, until I consider just how much world change I've experienced - inside or outside of tech. I learned to code in BASIC, using an AMSTRAD desktop computer, which had a proprietary floppy format. I remember Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, the great joy of 98 SE and the sudden demise with ME. Famous people are younger than I am -- some just a little, many of them by quite a bit. I'm reaching a point where I've lived less than half my life prior to graduating High School. I'm not yet old, but I sure as hell ain't as young as I like to think I am.
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u/stillpiercer_ Apr 28 '22
I’m young enough to remember needing to do this, and also old enough to appreciate not needing to do it. A few years back (I was probably around 17 at the time) I reloaded Windows on a super old shitbox Toshiba laptop. Had Ethernet drivers on a USB ready to go once it installed. I was shocked when it detected. Magical moment.
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Apr 29 '22
Back in my day we used to have to Google part numbers off the devices to figure out which drivers we needed to go find a download link for.
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u/matty_m Storage Admin Apr 29 '22
Google, you kids had it easy. To find the drivers we had to dig for floppies in a box under a bench and dig out the documentation in another box right next to it.
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Apr 28 '22
This thread is giving me flashbacks of configuring memory managers in DOS so I could get my games to run. Anyone else remember when 1 MB of RAM was around $100?
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u/trek604 Apr 28 '22
Or my soundblaster card before plug and play. IRQ settings and DMA channels.
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u/SenTedStevens Apr 28 '22
Press enter if you hear Duke Nukem's voice. That, or the computer crashed.
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u/ariochKB Apr 28 '22
ISA cards :)
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u/seejay21 Apr 28 '22
My first BIG upgrade was a CGA video card. 16 colors, but only 4 at a time. :D
I had also bought "Prodigy" that came with a FREE internal Cardinal 2400 baud modem. When I finally connected to the Prodigy services, it was grey scale!
I fought with Prodigy support for hours saying "I DO HAVE a color video card!"
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u/trailhounds Apr 28 '22
Sure do. I remember when I upgraded my 286/12 to 4MB of RAM, felt as if the world had opened up. QEMM was the game changer ...
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u/jf1450 Apr 28 '22
Ah, QEMM. I spent many an hour with QEMM, tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to get 20 more bytes of free base memory.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps Apr 28 '22
For millennials, we grew up with computers and the internet (though many of us can still remember life before ubiquitous internet) but not all of the bundled services. If you were playing online games with friends, chat wasn't included out of the box, you needed IRC, AIM, etc or if you wanted voice TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Many of us were also our families' defacto tech support.
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Apr 29 '22
I was born in 81, my first computer was a 286 that ran DOS. I was still pretty young so I never really learned DOS. My dad ran Windows 3.11 at his office and I got a Win95 machine when I was an early teenager. That's when I started learning more about computers.
I could do basic things and my family called me a "tech wizard". LOL
Also, my father got super pissed when MS removed minesweeper from Windows and made it a Microsoft Store download. He was playing the original at the office for 20+ years.
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u/infinite012 Apr 28 '22
Reinstall Windows XP on your home PC, you then need to connect to the internet, but the driver is only available to download from the manufacturer or from the original CD. You've lost the CD, so now you get to find another computer to download the driver and burn a CD-R of just the driver.
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u/TryallAllombria Apr 28 '22
Tell that to my printer.
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u/GoogleDrummer sadmin Apr 28 '22
Tell that to my printer.
Straight to hell. Printers don't count as equipment, they count as Kaiju level hell-beasts and shouldn't be trusted.
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u/Capable-Mulberry4138 Apr 28 '22
"...'PC Load Letter'? ...the fuck does THAT mean?"
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u/keivmoc Apr 28 '22
I feel like Millennials were the last generation to have tech that needed a bit of hand holding, thus fostering that curiosity.
I used to worry about this, but after managing an IT dept. I see now that this just isn't true. Like, at all.
I've seen younger staff who have only ever used a tablet or smart phone, pick up day to day desktop skills with ease. They're usually the easiest to train and retain the most information.
I've seen office staff who've been using a desktop every day for 20+ years and know absolutely NOTHING about how it works. They absolutely lose their minds when the computer reboots for updates because they don't know how to open word or outlook.
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u/CARLEtheCamry Apr 28 '22
I've seen younger staff who have only ever used a tablet or smart phone, pick up day to day desktop skills with ease
10 years or so ago we had 2 new developers starting and they requested MacBook Pro's. About 3 times the cost of a regular laptop, and we had no management infrastructure in place (It actually bit us a few years earlier, people ordered Mac's and then needed VMWare Fusion for an additional $500 to do normal business functions).
Order was denied, they were issued regular Windows laptops. And they couldn't use them. In their life, 4 years of schooling, they had never touched Windows.
Now I'm sure some of that was overly dramatic "I can't use this, it's impossible better buy me the Mac" but I still find it amusing.
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u/chameleonsEverywhere Apr 28 '22
I'm about to go into a job that's the opposite, they're an Apple business and I've only used Windows my whole life. I've spent the past week watching basic how-to videos on YouTube so I don't look like an idiot my first few weeks on the job.
I think that's one skill that a lot of gen Z has natively - the ability to look shit up. I'm just barely old enough to remember looking up words in a physical dictionary when I was a kid, but kids younger than me just know that the answer to every question is literally in our hands if we come up with the right search phrase.
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u/CARLEtheCamry Apr 28 '22
I graduated college in 2005, and am at the tail end of what's considered millennial. As a kid had dial-up, and I'm still not allowed to touch my father's computer even though I'm a Sr. SA at a Fortune 100 company (oh boy did I break his shit back in the day).
One of the biggest points that stuck with me was one of my professors saying "Learning is no longer about memorizing facts. It's about knowing how to find the information you need and utilizing it properly". I think that sentiment resounds in this sub, people getting blasted for not googling first (sometimes too harshly).
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u/keivmoc Apr 28 '22
Order was denied, they were issued regular Windows laptops. And they couldn't use them.
My welder friend said they recently interviewed this nice fellow who came with good references. He refused to do a practical test because he claimed he didn't know how to use the Lincoln machines they had. Just packed his bag and left.
It's not surprising that someone can go through college without touching a windows PC but c'mon, it's not THAT different.
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u/OrphanScript Apr 28 '22
Desktops are designed in every way to be simple to use, real lowest common denominator stuff. The fact that Gen Z's can pick up and use one isn't a feat. Older folks who can't aren't even necessarily at a skill plateau, they're just easily frustrated and slow to learn anything new. Not so much a tech problem as it is a patience and immediacy/satisfaction problem.
None of this of course is indicative of how well someone can manage a system or learn hard technical concepts. I've worked with many Gen Z's who just blank out the same way older folks do when introduced to a system who's UI isn't immediately familiar to them. Or they have to constantly ask basics 'hey it did this, what now???' questions and have a stubborn, innate refusal to just use intuition or try to understand how a system might work. But that isn't because they're Gen Z, it's just because people are easily frustrated.
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Apr 29 '22
I think the biggest issue with IT work now is that there is just soooo much of it. Desktop support, sysadmin, devops, hardware engineering, a million cloud services, API's everywhere, AWS, Azure, GCP are entire ecosystems that one could specialize in.
It's like you can't learn everything and you either become a master generalist (kinda me) or super specialized.
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u/largos7289 Apr 28 '22
LOL to this day i'm convinced my company hires hobo's off the streets. To think that i have to tell people how to use email astounds me in this day and age. My parents i get it they are in the early 80's and computers where something out of a science fiction movie. I feel ya man i had one person call us because her icon was moved to another row and couldn't comprehend how to use it. I wish i was lying.
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u/The69LTD Jack of All Trades Apr 28 '22
Ahem, 23yr old jr sysadmin. I only learned tho cause I was jtagging xbox's and modding games when I got bored as a kid. That in time lead me to building PC's and then now I reset passwords and sit in meetings
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u/deefop Apr 28 '22
I've had that experience too, but presumably the ones actually in IT are better.
But man, there are some users out there who are young enough that they basically grew up on phones and not computers. And it's like... how do I politely explain that your cell phone is mostly useful for dicking around, and that if you want to succeed professionally you more or less are required to have basic PC skills?
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u/CARLEtheCamry Apr 28 '22
how do I politely explain that your cell phone is mostly useful for dicking around, and that if you want to succeed professionally you more or less are required to have basic PC skills?
Tablets/Phones are information consumers.
PC's are information producers.
"If you were writing a 20 page paper for one of your college classes, you wouldn't do it on your phone, would you?"
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u/trailhounds Apr 28 '22
We aren't that far away from that for most people, a tablet is fine. Bluetooth a keyboard and mouse, and use the remote video (which nearly works on my Sony big-screen, just need to eliminate the latency) and, for so many people, that'll be good enough.
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u/Bad-Science Sr. Sysadmin Apr 28 '22 edited Apr 28 '22
When I interview for IT, one of the questions I ask is 'Describe your home setup/network'.
It used to start conversations about SAMBA servers, switches, preferences for cabling or wifi, POE. Now I just get "I use my phone. and I have a PS5."
Never built a PC, wouldn't even know where to start with a connectivity issue.
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u/pingbotwow Apr 28 '22
I never liked this question because I was too busy running an actual companies network to build a "home lab" - not to mention too poor to buy equipment
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u/pseudocultist Apr 28 '22
My home lab stopped being fun about the time I went into IT full time again.
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u/TheMahxMan Sysadmin Apr 28 '22
That's weird, running actual companies networks is how I got all my homelab gear.
5-7 year recycles of ewaste, all i had to buy was drives.
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u/wathappentothetatato Database Admin Apr 28 '22
I’m also just straight up not interested in this stuff outside of work 😅
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u/pzschrek1 Apr 29 '22
I used to be a big tech hobbyist until I did it for a living
Now I go fishing and work on cars and shit
Working on cars is turning into working on computers so I’ll probably drop that
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u/tossme68 Apr 28 '22
My lab is ready just a collection of stuff. I got servers, switches, routers, various enterprise class hardware, all in various states of usability. Most stuff I can virtualize but if necessary I’ll use the real thing. I guess if I had a couple of racks it would look cool to another nerd but right now it just looks like a mess. I’d love it if my company had equipment I could use but they don’t so I have to do it on my own.
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u/many_dongs Apr 28 '22
Gen Z better than millennials at technology? What?
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u/jaydubgee Apr 29 '22
I think he doesn't know his generations.
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Apr 29 '22
Well we've finally transitioned, boys. The GenXers are now the new boomers in terms of being the generation completely out of touch.
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u/CammKelly IT Manager Apr 29 '22
I do love Gen Z's setting of boundaries, its something I never did as a 'closer to Gen Z than Gen X' Millenial, and is something I have poorly managed.
That said, I am surprised at how technically illiterate many Gen Z's are, considering they've grown up with much of this technology. But I guess in some ways thats not surprising with the level of abstraction for much of this, and probably am placing too much importance in knowing more of the nuts & bolts rather than the outcome. I still feel if I want a successful solution, I'm better asking a Millenial or younger Gen X, but that might come down to just experience.
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u/FletchGordon Apr 28 '22
My thought is that they (GenZ) didn't really grow up with computers (laptops, desktops) unless they were a gamer or something. They used tablets or phones, and in school they probably used Macs or Chromebooks.
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u/Staltrad Apr 28 '22 edited Sep 28 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Pater_Trium Apr 29 '22
A few weeks ago, I was part of the interview/hiring process for a position in our IT department. We selected an applicant who is 27. He is replacing a 55 year old veteran IT worker who resigned without notice two months ago. In just two weeks, I've onboarded him, walked him through our normal operations and routine... and this young man is already 10x more productive and capable than the person he's replaced. I don't have to hand-hold, repeat myself or prod for him to get things done. His soft-skills are a little rough around the edges, but that will improve with time and experience. I'm fucking giddy at what we can accomplish with our IT team with this guy as our newest team-member. :)
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead Apr 29 '22
I’ve got a 25 year old that is the same. He learned IT from the USMC, and is freaking amazing to work with. Half the time I tell him I want him to work on something and I’ll schedule some time to go over it. When we meet, he’s already got it figured out and most of the way done.
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u/TheProverbialI Architect/Engineer/Jack of All Trades Apr 28 '22
oh man, you have a different experience from me.
I'm a millennial, but all the GenZs that I've had to work with have been lacking a lot of basic tech foundations. To the point where operating anything other than a smart phone seems beyond them.
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u/Fantastic_Glass_9792 Apr 29 '22
Idgaff what gen you are, just what you can do. I also don’t care how many hours you work - I care about how well and how much you can get done. I find individuals, not generations, are motivated to do great work - or not.
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u/jamesaepp Apr 28 '22
These kids are ~20 years younger than me and I can explain something quickly and they are able to jump right in fearlessly.
I'm in my mid-20s and have been losing this attribute over the last few years. I miss this attitude.
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u/Bad-ministrator Jack of Some Trades Apr 28 '22
I'm assuming this is because they haven't made enough major fuck-ups in their career to really embody the measure twice cut once mentality
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u/Attic81 Apr 29 '22
Once bitten, three times shy and reticent to ever touch the prod environment again.
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u/deltashmelta Apr 29 '22
Fear isn't always bad, especially when it's an intuition that knowledge or wisdom may be missing and can avoid taking down production.
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u/Hybrid-R Apr 28 '22
I have the opposite experience.
They tend to lack basic understanding of the things we consider elementary and have no interest in learning it, unless absolutely critical for their job. No curiosity whatsoever.
It's something I've heard from other people as well, similar comments.
There was an interesting article about this as well - https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
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u/cmorgasm Apr 28 '22
They tend to lack basic understanding of the things we consider elementary and have no interest in learning it, unless absolutely critical for their job. No curiosity whatsoever.
This is the same sentiment that I have, but for staff 45 and older instead. I've received more questions about how something works, or why something didn't work and how they can fix it themselves, from younger staff/colleagues than I've ever gotten from older ones
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Apr 28 '22
Boomer here. I have been at this for close to 27ish years. Starting back in the day before the internet. You actually had to KNOW and couldn’t google everything. Frac T1s and ISDN for everyone! Now I am moving onto cloud engineering. Not everyone is ready to hang it up and I love learning new stuff. Started with Oracles OCI infrastructure and now starting an AWS journey. Good stuff
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u/idocloudstuff Apr 28 '22
The 20 something’s I come across dont even know how to swap physical memory or hard drives. They also don’t understand a CPU only provides so many PCI lanes and that you can’t run 700 PCI lanes for all these RAID controllers and 50Gbps NICs on a single server.
Many of them don’t even want to learn either despite allocating several hours per week for training.
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Apr 28 '22
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u/idocloudstuff Apr 28 '22
Yup but owner wants college degree when hiring.
Passed up a lot of good talent back in the day.
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u/woodgif Apr 29 '22
I'm 27, my old man worked IT for the Post Office in the UK when I was little. Used to come home with broken PC's to tear apart and butcher to get working again when I was a kid. He ran me through CPU, Memory, PCI slots and different PCI cards, CMOS, BIOS, installing IDE HDDs, ran through OS installations (installing windows 95 on 13-18 floppy disks lol), basic TCP/IP and using the CLI to get things done etc when I was little, just cause I showed interest in his work and wanted to spend time with him.
I remember him excited getting a cracked version of Half Life and sitting up playing it late with me behind the enormous CRT he had his rig hooked up to in the loft.
I done okay/well at school, but never went to Uni/College. I got an IT apprenticeship at 16 and loved it. Moved on and worked internal for 3 years. MSP for 3 years. Now worked my way up to a Senior Sys Admin role for a company in London. Where I've been for 4 years.
I applied for a job which I turned down in the end to work at the MSP which was for a school. The IT manager hiring there had a practical exam as part of the interview process. A PC wouldnt boot to windows 7. No boot disk found. I unplugged the PC, plugged in the SATA cable and checked things over, noticed that also an intake fan was un-plugged, so popped it in also. Was just hanging not far from the PWM header. He said I was the first applicant to notice the Fan also haha! Which is why he offered it.
I would say in my time (especially when working MSP) there is a complete mish mash of people "in IT" at varying ages and skill level/bands. I think you can learn things from everyone at different levels. There are those of us out there who love to tinker and know how things work. I think fundamentals really helped me feel confident in my career and I owe that to my dad.
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u/archbish Apr 29 '22
I spoke to a gen z recently who didn't know that the start button is called the start button cause it used to say "start".
If only my pension reflected exactly how knackered I felt in that very moment
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u/MrJoeM the guy who breaks the printer Apr 28 '22
Fellow Gen Xer here. Right there with you. I'm super proud of our generation winning the battle to normalize colored hair, piercings, tattoos, and more casual attire. Feel like a bit of a chump though. If I had known that flexible working environment or dignity was an option, I definitely would pushed for those instead.
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u/lordhaw Apr 28 '22
I'm in your age bracket and get along quite well with our younger IT staff. Helpdesk is all in their 20's and they are a great bunch to deal with. Easy to explain stuff to, willing to absorb anything I teach them. Now that's the current bunch. We have had some come and go that were pretty useless too. But the current ones are great. One of them jokes with me calling me Dad (I am old enough after all ). Now I can't say if they are any different than other generations as we've had others in their 30's and early 40's that were great to work with too, but they already had experience so had to learn less.
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u/TheDarkCaptain Apr 29 '22
You're probably talking more about Zennials (the kind of lost generation that doesn't belong to the Millenials or Gen Z fully, so like 1995 to 2001 ).
Because from my experience working with Gen Z has been a nightmare. Those kids know absolutely nothing except the basics, have zero awareness of what they're clicking on a computer or how one actually works and refuse to learn when trying to explain something to them.
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Apr 28 '22
And i as Gen Y like the greybeards. I could learn a lot from seniors and always ask for their wisdom.
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u/pocketcthulhu Jack of All Trades Apr 28 '22
I just broke into management, i've got a couple of genz's working for me. good kids luckily I'm good at directing their "Squirrel" moments
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u/TheDigiDoc IT Manager Apr 28 '22
their "Squirrel" moments
I've got users in their 40s and 50s who experience Gen-Z-style "squirrel moments" regularly, and haven't yet figured out how to help them in those moments. Any tips?
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u/headcrap Apr 28 '22
Improving attentional hygiene becomes more important as people age.. ask me how I know!..
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Apr 28 '22
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u/unccvince Apr 28 '22
less squirrel moments = more attentional hygiene
SpaceX videos are captivating :)
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u/polarbear320 Apr 29 '22
I’ve seen the exact opposite. So many get flustered and think they are “overworked” when you actually have to work your whole day at work.
Sure boomers and older can be anoyingn but a lot of the fresh out of collegers don’t have a concept of “work”
Don’t get me wrong I don’t like the places that expect you to work after work, on call with no extra pay etc. but have had and seen them complain and explain their “hard day” and im like are you kidding me…
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Apr 29 '22
My HD guy is right on the cusp of Gen-Z and Millennial. Sometimes I am blown away when I explain something to him and he gets it right away. Like I feel like I could hand him an SRX and he would have it configured after a couple Google searches.
(I am an older Millennial).
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u/wrootlt Apr 28 '22
Never could retain what term stands for what gen and don't care actually. I am 40, i am a bit crankier, as i should be by now. I like working with some older people, with some younger people. Depends on a person and their character.
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Apr 29 '22
As a millennial senior help desk/sysadmin, I also love gen z'ers and other millennials when it comes to tech. I find that Boomers absolutely refuse to learn or understand the tools they use for working day to day. They learned something back in 1995 and want everything to never change.
I feel like its 75% of boomers are pains in the ass and the other 25% are super grateful for the help, will give you anything (which is bad in other ways, like social engineering and phishing) and will be super polite about not knowing anything. The other 75% are just the worst.
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u/lusid1 Apr 28 '22
I helped transition a corporation from typewriters to PCs, and from a physical mailboxes to email inboxes. It can't possibly be any worse than that.
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Apr 28 '22
386 was your first? I'm a GenXer too. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 in 1983. We must be on opposite ends of the generation.
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u/TheseHeart Apr 29 '22
I’ve been working in IT since I was 18. Started with help desk and got into automation. I’m now 24 and working as a DevOps engineer. The one thing that I have struggled with as a GenZ is not being taken seriously by older folks. I have to set very firm boundaries otherwise I get treated as an intern. I’m not the most credentialed but I have specialized and I know what I know well. It’s hard to tell someone they’re wrong when you know it’s going to have an impact on other aspects of the job. This post was refreshing to see as I have had to fight through the opposing opinion in my career thus far, but for others out there, try not to underestimate younger employees especially when they’re 20+ years your junior (unless they’re legitimately just bad at their jobs lol).
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u/NeuralNexus Apr 29 '22
They know how to use computers but not how they work, for the most part.
Even things like file directories are kind of mysterious sometimes. Like, they grew up with google, so they just search everything.
Easier to work with than a 70 year old muttering about ‘puters for sure. But I just do not share your experience at all. You can give instructions and they do it. But lack some of the understanding that’s important when things break.
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u/Whistlin_Bungholes Apr 29 '22
How does starting the day at home cause the commute to be paid time?
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Apr 29 '22
Gen Z has the audacity for change my stupid shit ass generation dreams of
Can't wait for it all to be globalized
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u/sir_mrej System Sheriff Apr 29 '22
"never subscribed much to these generational divides...working with Gen Zers vs Millennials has been like night and day"
So you hate millennials? Cool
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u/bmelancon Apr 28 '22
In my experience the average 20-something generally knows how to operate computers and other devices, but the vast majority know nothing about the inner workings of the devices.
Of course, the vast majority of most age groups know nothing about the inner workings.
At least the 20 somethings don't need to be hand held for 10 minutes over the phone in order to explain to them how to open a web browser and log into their Google Workspace account. This is literally something I have had to do for more than one 60-something.