Gen Y Tech Savvy, But Not Interested in a Career 593
jcatcw writes "Young people aren't choosing computer science majors because they take technology for granted — it's something to use not something to make a career. "By and large, this generation is very fluent with technology and with a networked world," according to James Ware, executive producer at The Work Design Collaborative LLC, a Berkeley, Calif., consortium exploring workplace values and the future of the workforce. That future may be in managing technology, which requires skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up. One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance."
Re:Critical thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
Sign of the times... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a point in your life when you realize that the world has changed, that "nerdy" topics aren't so nerdy anymore, especially now that they are in the mainstream.
Generation Y (ugh!) is undeniably using the tools around them to get things done, just as my generation did a decade ago with more primitive technology. But suffice to say, the reason to get a job in the tech industry is not because you want to play with what you're already using but because you want to create something new. This is not for everyone and I think regardless of the "tech level" society seems to achieve there will always be a minority of tech-career oriented people.
It is from how they've been raised... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike how we grew up....many of today's kids don't play outside much. They don't get out and meet and interact with the kids in the neighborhood, which teaches some good people skills. It also starts engendering a sense of independence. Parents cart the around to planned, and rigidly structured events...soccer practice, lessons of some kind, etc.
We've also sapped out the competitive spirit that kids once had. We played games...there were winners and losers. You had to learn both sides of the coin. Now...we give everyone a trophy because the just participated. We lower the standards in classrooms, 'cause we don't want to hurt little Billy/Susie's self esteem. We teach the wrong things here...the real world is NOT like that, it is not one big happy area where everyone is equal, and treated equal. That has to be quite a shock. We've let kids slide too far with respect to discipline. While I'm not talking specifically about corporal punishment (I don't think throwing that out the door was good either), but, personal discipline...responsibility for actions. If kids screw up, Mom and Dad cover for them....I've heard teachers saying when they had a child acting up, and could actually get a parent in for a conference, the teacher gets berrated over accusing little Johnny of wrongdoing, rather than trying to work together to correct his behavior. Of course later little Johnny expects he'll be covered/forgiven if he's late for work, or just doesn't show up a day for some reason.
Do kids even work these days in high school? As soon as I was 16...I got my first job washing dishes in a medium end restaurant...I worked my way up to head bus boy (even back then in my state you had to be 21 to serve alcohol)...I worked Fri-Sat. evenings....and usually 2 week nights. I saved my money, and when I was a senior, my folks added a little money to mine, and I bought my first car (datsun 280Z). I don't know of any of my friends whose kids actually work jobs....everything is given.
I'd say a lot of this is the past gen. or so's fault....and these kids are in for a shock when they hit the real world.
liking to drive doesn't make you a mechanic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"In my day . . ." (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, you and the parent are right in that lot of stuff just repeats itself, but some doen't. Look at the generation that experienced the great depression (my grandparents). Those people were much more fiscally responsible than my parents generation (the baby boomers). You see a similar thing in Japan or Germany, on account of major portions of those countries being nearly completely leveled after WWII and nearly an entire generation of young men never came home again. After WWI, the people who went through that were referred to as "The Lost Generation,", you can guess why. People that live through that sort of stuff tend to me much more careful, whereas the younger generations are much more carefree. So it could be that Gen X, Y, Z etc. are getting to progressively more self-centered and showing increasingly less fiscal responsibility (it would explain the housing crisis).
Re:Fluent? Not really... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find is that people are very adept at using technology in a seemingly educated and knowing manner but are often at a loss for the how's and why's. "I point the remote at the TV and it turns on. It's not turning on now. Stupid broken TV!" And then you point out that a DVD case was set in front of the receiver window which is located on the lower right side of the TV. "Damn, how did you figure that out?"
I remember the disbelieving state of shock I was in when I figured out french fries came from potatoes and pickles were actually cucumbers that had been pickled. I was five. The point is, some people have NEVER been disabused of such childhood assumptions or just basic ignorance, even well into adulthood.
Re:Nah it'll just be outsourced (Score:2, Interesting)
Careers in IT Suck, that's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Me? I dropped IT given my first opportunity and have yet to look back.
Re:Critical thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this is being modded funny right now, but I think it is the most insightful reason that has been provided up to now.
Re:Lazy Kids ! (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, the ABA had worked to prevent law schools from proliferating to the point it's at today (nearly two hundred law schools!) in order to keep the field from being glutted with unintelligent and uneducated lawyers. Once the ABA was denied the ability to restrict the number of law schools, every crappy school in the country wanted a law school. Law schools typically have enormous cost/benefit ratios, due to the limited start-up cost and high return on investment (i.e. profitability of alumni). While this remained true initially, the crappier schools popping up today are failing at that too, dragging their schools even further down.
You want fewer crappy lawyers? Lobby to allow the ABA to get back to its job of keeping those people out of our field.
Re:It is from how they've been raised... (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I agree, I wouldn't use the word "fault"... More like "success". And like it or not, the "real world" needs to accomodate the next generation, not the other way around).
Don't confuse "I don't live to work, I work to live" with a misplaced sense of entitlement, they very much differ. Employers need to come to terms with that fact, and adjust accordingly (or fade into oblivion as their ageing "traditional" workforce fades away to nothing). The new talent won't work themselves to death just for more money than they can use in all the free time their jobs dosn't leave them. They won't trade every 50 weeks of their life for a mere two in which to really live. They won't shut up and sit in a sunless cube-farm when they could just as efficiently do their work sitting on a grassy hillside or from a cafe or for that matter from home. But they will work - Just on their terms.
As an aside, I have around ten years too many to fit into Gen-Y (and the same amount to late to fit Gen-X). But I very much approve of the changes coming to the concept of employment - And if the Y'ers can pull it off, I'd say the previous generation did an admirable job raising them.
Re:Nah it'll just be outsourced (Score:2, Interesting)
Where I work we have pretty flexible hours. I get into work at about 6 in the morning, and I'm out by 2:30-3:00. I have a family I like to spend time with in the evening. Say you're working on a piece of a project that we are working on, and you've written some code that absolutely confounds me, but I think I may need to extend it to handle something else. I decide after spending some time trying to work out what's going on, that it's too much for me to bite off at the moment and I need to go straight to the source and see if you can give me a hand understanding what you're trying to do.
If you were in at a sane time, I could send you an im, email, or walk over and bounce a couple questions off of you. Since you don't get in until 4, I have to settle for sending an email or leaving a note explaining the situation and hope that when I check my mail in the morning that you A) replied B) understood what I was asking and C) Answered my question sufficiently enough to allow me to go about my business. If none of the requirements are met, that's now time lost.
Tossing aside all arguments that I should be fired for incompetence (maybe I'm a junior programmer who needs guidance), there's a legitimate need for all employees to be at the same place at the same time if they are working on related projects. If you're flying solo on a project that doesn't impact anyone - then where do you work, and do they have any job openings?
Re:Lazy Kids ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just as business people simplify IT that requires specialists and is repetative, we should simplify legal activities that require specilists but happen repetatively.
Seriously-- 99% of divorces could be handled by a "divorce specialist" who would make 60 grand a year instead of 120 grand a year. Law has gotten so big, it needs to be broken down and streamlined.
Today? Work/Life Balance. (Score:5, Interesting)
What really goads me lately is this massive latching on by the current mainstream press that Work/Life balance is some evil concept. It's as though striving to have a life outside your work simply isn't tolerable. Don't these tools who feed this party line when writing the articles want a life as well?
We are entering a time of extreme excess for the bulk of humanity in 1st world nations, it's okay if we all want to slow down some and enjoy this new world we have. Frankly if we all really worked as hard as people did thirty or fourty years ago we'd either run out of work or resources quickly. This is why we need to continue to push an information economy because its central resource is people something we still have plenty of (for now).
I'm amazed when talking to people on the East Coast and they mock West Coast things like Work/Life balance with derision and a wave of the hand. Unless you *really* enjoy your job above all else, what's wrong with wanting it to have less importance in your life? For most of us, work, is a means to an end. This is your only life, enjoy it! Take a vacation! Get drunk/high! Have sex! Do whatever makes you happy as long as it doesn't directly impede the joy of others.
Re:Fluent? Not really... (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of an experience I had a couple years ago. My cousin (who is about 16 now) wanted to install some game on his computer. It was a Windows XP machine with a normal install wizard, and he was held up by some error or another. It wasn't a big deal so I don't even remember what the problem was, but it got me thinking.S
I remembered being a kid, trying to play the latest Space Quest game from Sierra, and having to figure out which sound card I should choose during the install. My actual soundcard wasn't on the list, so I had to guess which one was more compatible, and it was a bit of trial and error. I remembered having to write custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files for different games to load different TSRs, and use different options of EMM386 or HIMEM.SYS. I remembered how impressed I was with myself when I figured out how to use AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to make a little menu system that allowed me to choose the configuration I wanted while it was booting. I remembered trying to write little BASIC and Pascal programs to do things because... well, computers didn't do that much. I wasn't using my computer to store my music collection or watch movies. The big thing for me to do with computers in those days (besides playing games) was just to screw around with the computer to see what I could get it to do.
And it kind of made me sad that my cousin would never go through that. Sure, he'll be more computer savvy than my grandparents because he's grown up with computers, but he'll probably never understand computers as well as he would have if he were a few years older. Working in IT for a few years, it seems like the most helpful people are those who are young enough that they had computers when they were kids (and therefore grew up thinking about them), but old enough to have experimented with computers back when they weren't so easy.
Given housing, healthcare and education costs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Times they are a changin', I'll get off your lawn now.
Re:Critical thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
She got kids who had previously failed the MCAS tests to pass and not just pass, but pass by a wide margin...but she taught to a each child's needs and learning style. She stood up for the laws for the national laws and state laws for the special needs for the children she taught. A host of other things that the schools systems just plain didn't like.
She was actually told to do what it ever it took pass kids, and by this I mean fudging test grades and class grades, pass them at all costs even if they don't deserve to pass...I'm not talking about the 64-65 one point bubble here...more like 23! Shock when kids acted like assholes, didn't do their work, and didn't make an effort she gave them failing grades, suggested they stay back...Oh My God! Think of Child! Last year, one parent WANTED the kid to stay back because of failing grades, the school system overrode the parent's opinion on the matter. Despite the parent's opinion and failing grades in 4 classes the kid was passed on to the next grade. Not even summer school required!
Re:The change is in application, not education. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm kind of a late-twentysomething, and I started a CS degree and didn't really like it, either. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was very interested in computers, the CS degree wasn't really for me. In what was perhaps a strange move, I ended up majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Literature. Go figure.
What might have been more surprising, though, was what happened when I got out of college. I took a job working as a helpdesk tech. Having worked with CS graduates and people with a bunch of certs, I hold my own with pretty much everything except the actual programming. I'm even fine with the logic issues, more or less, but I'm not a programmer and I don't want to be, so it's not really a problem. But what I've found is that all my years of fixing computers often helps me diagnose problems better and faster than people who've just studied computers. When something breaks, the CS majors sometimes focus too much on how they think computers are supposed to work, but don't always have a lot of experience in how computers tend to malfunction.
I did better doing helpdesk work than the others because, in addition to my real-life computer repair experience, I also had better people skills. Then I did well as a network tech because I had better research skills. Now I'm doing pretty well as the Director of Technology because I have a variety of skills that help me make decisions regarding computers, asset allocation, budgeting, personnel, and business strategy.
Now, admittedly, if you're concerned that there aren't enough people going the hard-core engineer route, I'm not a good example. I'm not an engineer. In fact, I wasn't even all that interested in an IT career when I started out. I just found that the helpdesk job was the best job I could find, and things took off from there. I'm just saying that, sometimes, what you studied in school isn't nearly as important as we tend to think.
There are only about 26,000 real CS jobs in the US (Score:3, Interesting)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are only about 26,000 "computer science" jobs in the United States. Not "information technology", not system administration, not tech support, but the jobs where people actually research and develop new technology.
If you're really good, there are openings in the operating systems groups for the iPhone and the Palm. There's good technical work to be done there, the pay is OK but not spectacular, you will have no life, you get no respect, and few will ever understand what you did. (If you take the iPhone job, you get to meet Steve Jobs and have him scream at you.)
The trouble is, if you're smart enough to do those jobs, you can probably do better doing something else. Two smart young people I know, with Stanford CS degrees, are running hedge funds.
And that's the top of the field. Further down, it's much worse, endlessly fixing systems that could have been designed not to fail, but for which the costs to do that would have been higher than fixing them.
I'm not complaining personally; I've done very well in computer science. But I can't recommend it as a career choice today.
Chicken or Egg? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Critical thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife's doing her semester of student teaching before she graduates with a degree in elementary education, and some of her stories are horrifying.
These 5th graders (5th graders!) have to have cheat sheets for single-digit multiplication. Apparently it's getting common to have such sheets available in high school math classes, too. Yet, they're trying to teach them about fractions, and soon enough they'll be doing factoring and all kinds of other things that will require proficiency in the most basic of mathematical tasks... but they have none! Some of them still count on their fingers! To make it worse, the teachers can't spend time going back over the earlier things, because that's not making progress toward passing the god damned tests, so they just plow ahead with the new material hoping that the students will be able to bluff their way through it (and usually, it seems, they can) but the students don't really know what they're doing at all.
These 12-year-olds can't figure out how much money they'll need to buy 7 bags of candy at 4 dollars a piece without looking it up, and no-one's likely to teach it to them between now and graduation. But the school's scoring well above average on the fucking tests, so everything's great. Ugh, and don't even get me started on the other stuff. No recess (NO! RECESS!) for ANY grade, because they have to work toward passing the tests ALL THE TIME, drastically reduced science and history (social studies, whatever you want to call it) because math and reading are the two big topics for the tests, never mind the externalities of learning science and history (like vocabulary-building! even the "high" level readers, 7th to 12th grade reading levels, have shockingly limited vocabularies!).
Grrrr....
Bastards.
It's not just NCLB, I'll admit. Too many administrations are lazy as hell, or too eager to try out some damned fad they read about, and so they are changing things up every year (or even more frequently). Too few of them understand enough about science and research to be able to intelligently evaluate and apply new findings in the field of education to their schools, and a lot of what gets accepted as "science" in the science of education is ridiculous crap with glaring method problems, but it doesn't get weeded out by these incompetents running the schools. Some of it's lazy or inept teaching. But NCLB plays to the worst parts of these pre-existing problems.
Re:Lazy Kids ! (Score:5, Interesting)
> You want fewer crappy lawyers? Lobby to allow the ABA to get back to its job of keeping those people out of our field.
I have a better idea: let's change things to make lawyers less needed in the first place.
I used to be in law school, and this is what I concluded before moving to a profession that produces value, not consumes it:
a) Ignorance is not a defense, but
b) It's easy to violate a law, often regardless of mens rea.
Why is b) true? Because thanks to our wonderful common-law system, there's an ungodly number of statutes. These statutes are inter-related, not necessarily the way you'd expect, and the relationships are often only implied. Of course, it's not just enough to know what's on the books, but also know how their interpretation has been modified by precedents (and not just local precedents either; judgments from overseas can have an effect too). How is anybody other than some specialist in the area supposed to untangle that? So we have people who acted in what they believed to be a lawful manner being punished. I find it particularly charming when even legal experts are largely clueless outside their area of specialization. In fact, I'm charmed by the number of specialists who don't even know their own specialization all that well. This isn't a problem of education, this is a problem of out-of-control complexity.
You'd expect that every citizen of society should clearly understand what is expected of them, right? If they break a law, which they of course knew about, there are repercussions. This is just. Instead you have cases being decided on fine nuances of meaning of single words thanks to whatever crazed set of precedent and statute some team of lawyers was able to drag together, rationalized by the excuse that it's a living law. Now toss in lawyers who charge sums of money that is beyond the reach of most people (and pro bono is a risible excuse to protect your guilty consciousness', because you fuckers almost never do it except for friends or cases that'll improve your visibility), and who only benefit by dragging cases out, and we have a problem. A few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a simple printout of some old template in your local copy of wordperfect or word, and it's not just a problem, it's pathetic unadulterated greed at everyone else's expense.
In short, to your profession and those of you who 'graduated' to politics: fuck you. You're a leech on society and promulgate a fundamentally unjust and morally-repugnant system. I don't know how you sleep at night -- while your new associates naively slave away of course. If Diogenes was to wander into a law firm you'd try to sell him a lamp for $5,000, and yet you're supposed to help propagate justice?
Advice for the rest of you: never use a lawyer unless the amount is -- or worth -- millions. Just move on; you'll save yourself much grief and debt.
Re:Critical thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is when you made education mandatory lots of people stopped valuing it. It turned in to something you had to get through to make it to adulthood. Most kids started hating it. You also had a situation where you had some bright intelligent kids who probably did value their education, did well in school, and wanted to succeed, thrown in the middle of large numbers of kids who hate school, hate people who do well in school and ridicule and bully kids who do well at it. Its kind of a system designed to fail. No Child Left Behind is just the pinnacle of the brokenness. Rather than focusing resources on the kids who are most able and will be the future technologists and captains of industry all the focus is on trying to make the worst students who hate education the most, just pass a rudimentary skills test. I could be wrong but I think India's schools do the opposite of No Child Left Behind, and look for the best students, fast track them and spare no expense on them.
Of course India has a very stratified society and someone is going to rant at me about how all children are equal in America and stratifying our education is bad. If America wants to succeed in a globalized world stratification is urgently needed so you get the talented kids out of lowest common denominator public schools where they are surrounded by kids who are going to fail in school and try to take down the talented kids with them.
Re:Nah it'll just be outsourced (Score:3, Interesting)
Re your question "Can you show me any benefit my boss would derive from requiring me to wear a suit or that I must be in the office around certain hours?"
I can, actually, but not about the suit part. Even though I'm not your boss, I do manage a half-dozen engineers on my team... and I could care less about what they wear, btw.
What it comes down to for me is that (if you're an experienced, senior engineer) there's more than just tasking involved in your tenure. People from many parts of the organization have probably come to depend on your insight and experience to make effective decisions, keep themselves out of trouble, ensure that things are being done right, etc. Those people are usually not the senior folks (though they could be), and might include other managers & directors outside of your group or department. A lot of these are walk-up questions, or phonecall-on-the-spur-of-the-moment questions. When you're not there, they'll have to go to someone else, perhaps someone else they trust less, or perhaps someone else that doesn't know the topic as well as you. Then, when you slide into your chair after lunchtime, the damage of bad information or poor knowledge has already been done and you'll spend the next few hours of your valuable time correcting the issue or hunting down the wicked to get them to correct it. For your manager, it's a net loss of your productivity. As for the rationale of "I'm here to answer questions after normal office hours." Well, that's nice and everything, but it's better to have nobody around to answer off-hours calls so that the regular daytime coverage can be used and that the customer doesn't get the feel like the stated hours for support coverage are meaningless. Once a customer gets the idea that the hours of availability are not as stated, they'll ask for a lot more that isn't stated in the long run.
Really, if you want to work your own hours, you should work for yourself -- be a consultant, make a ton of money on projects you self-select, take vacations when you want them, or just start your own company.