“Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own." Sidney J. Harris
By virtue of having always been in the technology business I have forever worked around young people. When I was young so was everyone else since the whole industry was young. Oh, I once had a boss who was forty, but he was an anomaly. As I grew older the young people, who now could actually go to school to be in the business, started packing in behind me and slowly me and my contemporaries became the minority as well as the ancient.
This has been good in so many ways. Young people bring so much energy and possess fearlessness that hasn’t yet been extracted from them. They bring new vision and new thoughts and new music and new language. They see things so differently.
Because of all this I’ve always felt younger than my age but I suppose many of us do as we reach “middle age”. But when you have to show up every day and work and hang with young people and then work for young people you get to make a choice.
Adapt and embrace or fight and fail.
I’m finding many of my old buddies slipping more and more into the fight and fail category. Not because they can’t adapt, not because they can’t keep up and not because they don’t have the juice anymore. See Old and Bold.
No, it’s mainly because they’re tired of having the exact same conversation on the exact same subject for the 9,487th time. Almost always with some Wunderkind who’s convinced they’ve found some problem so totally new and so totally different that no dinosaur from the age of mainframes could ever “get it”.
The problem is we “get it” too well since we’ve probably solved this type problem a thousand different times. So we tend to roll our eyes, sigh, give a 30 word explanation for solution and try to get on to other things. But Kid Wonder cannot accept that his totally unique situation can have such a straight-forward (and usually fairly simple) solution.
Arrogance vs. Apathy. And then the fight began
Part of the problem, as I’ve stated, is if you go back to our beginnings we were young but so was everyone else so we didn’t have the age barrier issues. Thus we never really adapted ourselves to young vs. old dynamics. Everyone was screaming at everyone else because we all, naturally, were right and we just had to get the others to shut up and listen.
So, yeah, we old’ns need to do a better job of catering to the ego of Boy Blunder. We need to frown and rub our temples, squint our eyes and proclaim that this, indeed, is a tough one and that we may need a few days to research and contemplate.
Nothing a week at Pebble Beach (on the company) probably wouldn’t solve.
By virtue of having always been in the technology business I have forever worked around young people. When I was young so was everyone else since the whole industry was young. Oh, I once had a boss who was forty, but he was an anomaly. As I grew older the young people, who now could actually go to school to be in the business, started packing in behind me and slowly me and my contemporaries became the minority as well as the ancient.
This has been good in so many ways. Young people bring so much energy and possess fearlessness that hasn’t yet been extracted from them. They bring new vision and new thoughts and new music and new language. They see things so differently.
Because of all this I’ve always felt younger than my age but I suppose many of us do as we reach “middle age”. But when you have to show up every day and work and hang with young people and then work for young people you get to make a choice.
Adapt and embrace or fight and fail.
I’m finding many of my old buddies slipping more and more into the fight and fail category. Not because they can’t adapt, not because they can’t keep up and not because they don’t have the juice anymore. See Old and Bold.
No, it’s mainly because they’re tired of having the exact same conversation on the exact same subject for the 9,487th time. Almost always with some Wunderkind who’s convinced they’ve found some problem so totally new and so totally different that no dinosaur from the age of mainframes could ever “get it”.
The problem is we “get it” too well since we’ve probably solved this type problem a thousand different times. So we tend to roll our eyes, sigh, give a 30 word explanation for solution and try to get on to other things. But Kid Wonder cannot accept that his totally unique situation can have such a straight-forward (and usually fairly simple) solution.
Arrogance vs. Apathy. And then the fight began
Part of the problem, as I’ve stated, is if you go back to our beginnings we were young but so was everyone else so we didn’t have the age barrier issues. Thus we never really adapted ourselves to young vs. old dynamics. Everyone was screaming at everyone else because we all, naturally, were right and we just had to get the others to shut up and listen.
So, yeah, we old’ns need to do a better job of catering to the ego of Boy Blunder. We need to frown and rub our temples, squint our eyes and proclaim that this, indeed, is a tough one and that we may need a few days to research and contemplate.
Nothing a week at Pebble Beach (on the company) probably wouldn’t solve.
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