Are Millennials really Different? 5

[zdas04]

OK, we've heard it. And heard it. An heard it again--"millennials are different, they need different things from a workplace". A new study from Hay Research that looked at over 5 million employees finds it to be just another bullshit myth. Folks remain folks and the big difference between generations remains ... age. People in their 20's look at things differently from the way people in their 30's look at things. Always have. Always will.

Perceived generational differences are both nonsense and self-fulfilling prophecies (i.e., if you think someone needs to be treated differently, and you do, then they respond to the different treatment just like any generation would have). There is a story from Inc. Magazine about the study at A 5-Year Study Reveals the Truth About What Each Generation Wants in the Workplace (It's Not What You Think) The actual report can be downloaded at Hay Group Report

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[CWB1]

I believe the article's point was that millenials aren't different which I tend to agree with. The overindulgence in smart phones example is often brought up yet the biggest offenders seem to be the older 50+ guys, and phones havent really changed people's habits or nature. My wife and I were waiting on food at a known slow but good eatery a few years ago and overheard a couple comments from an older man in the next booth about our phone use. My wife was still a full time college student studying on her phone and I was researching a problem for work on mine. The ironic part was that we were both agreeable and being mutually productive, and after grumbling to his embarrassed wife (half the restaurant heard him) he picked up a newspaper and ignored her attempts to talk to him.

As for what older generatiions thought about boomers, there's many recorded examples but one of the better was one of Ralph Teetor's speeches to the SAE in which he expressed concern that boomers werent growing up amongst the struggles of subsistence agriculture as previous generations had. He argued that being sheltered in subdivision life as had become common was bad for developing good work ethic. I'm sure there is more to the issue but its interesting nontheless to compare historical perspectives to see similarities and differences of opinion.

 

[cranky108]

One of the possible shifts is there are fewer people who grew up in the rural areas.

And in many of the still rural areas there is no cell phone service, or it is much slower.

 

[zdas04]

cranky,
I don't know that that is true. The school I went to was very rural and has over twice as many students today as it had in 1971 when I graduated. I can't think of anyplace I've ever lived that rural populations were actually shrinking. Now if you were talking about percentages of the population, then it is true that a larger percentage of the population comes from urban and suburban place than rural places, but in terms of number of workers who came from rural locations the number is growing.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[cranky108]

When we talk about perception of things, I would tend to believe percentages are more of what is noticed. And this may be a local thing as percentages are different in different places.

Also as a reference, I don't think there as many young people bucking bails of hay. It's become more automated, as the bails have gotten bigger. So fewer rural kids are doing as much manual labor.
That's where I'm coming from.

More automation, fewer people who know what manual labor is. More people who want heated seats and automatic... and how it feels.

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Zdas,

I think there is a population decline or at best much slower growth in rural areas. The rural areas that are growing are becoming more urban or suburbs to urban areas and are not providing the same rural experience there once was. There are a lot fewer people working in agriculture. I grew up in a small farm town and the prospects for anyone that stayed were very low. Most who stayed, stayed to work on their family's farm. In the 1950's 20-25% of the population worked in agriculture in the U.S. Now, it is a little above 2% and it is only going to get worse with automation and the decline of family farms to large commercial operations. I think "rural" living for most is to live in the suburbs so that you are far enough out to do the outdoorsy things but close enough to find a decent job.

 

[zdas04]

HamburgerHelper,
I don't disagree that the percentages of the urban/rural mix is shifting ever more in the direction of urban/suburban. I was just disagreeing with the idea that the absolute numbers of people in rural areas is decreasing. 20 years ago it was something like 80% urban/suburban (this breakdown is hard to dig out of the census data) and 20% for the rest (which includes people in small towns). Today it is closer to 85-15, but that shift is not a decline in the rural population, just a bigger increase in the urban/suburban population.

The farm kid thing is really hard to dig out of the data. 2% of the population work in "agriculture", but there are a huge number of 4-20 acre "farms" where one or more parents work in industry, and the farm tasks fall to the children. The property doesn't qualify as "agriculture", but the work is the same. I grew up on one of these non-farms. Between the kitchen garden, the pigs we raised to butcher, the hay field, the 2 acre sorgum field, and the (few) cattle we raised for market it was a pretty big job for 3 kids with parental help on the weekends, but it was never in the statistics as "agriculture".

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[IRstuff]

Millennials are the first generation that has grown up with no stable technological history, i.e., everything that they are familiar with technology-wise is new and evolving. Their "good ole days" are literally only days long, compared with our "good ole days" that are more on the order of years or decades.

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[IRstuff]

According to census figures, rural population has almost been flat in the past century:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2016/comm/acs-rural-urban.png

The numbers tend to move around a bit; the bureau has been tweaking their definitions of "urban" over that last 4 decades.

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[FoxRox]

IRstuff - interesting about the "good ole days". The good ole days for my parents was three black & white channels on TV. The good ole days for me was flip phones. The scary thing is that technology continues to accelerate exponentially. My kids will have even less of a reference point to start with, and I will have even less of a clue about their reality and how to help them deal with it. For all the positive things technology brings, our culture is clearly in shock trying to adapt. High-speed internet and smart phones are like drugs for which the long term effects have never been tested. The common observation of millennials being different is (in part at least) a result of this rapid cultural change.

The real question here is... How much longer until the Butlerian Jihad?

 

[cranky108]

This may or may not apply here, but I noted that in consumers reports that the newer washing machines, while using less water, take more time to clean clothes. The offshoot is manufacturers are now offering machines, or stands that contain a second or smaller washer.

At the same time I tend to carp about how much slower my newer computer is than my old one is, and it is not backwards capable of running older software.

So it appears there is a moving shift to slower, and more features, that younger people are likely to accept.

Yes, men went to the moon with less computing horsepower than my current calculator.

 

[IRstuff]

"Yes, men went to the moon with less computing horsepower than my current calculator"

They went there with less computing power than your kindergarten calculator... ;-)

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[zdas04]

I've got a pretty fancy analog/digital watch that is on par with 1969 computing power available to NASA.

I worked on refueling two nuclear reactors in 1974 where the Gantt Chart project schedule (covered a very long wall of a large conference room) was drawn and maintained by draftsmen using pen and ink with manual drafting tools. I can't say it was any less effective than I can do today in Microsoft Project, but the people in charge were a lot less willing to change the schedule than we are today--wonder if we've really advanced? The project managers spent a lot more time understanding the steps and the interrelationships then than project managers tend to do today.

The slide rules and machine-language computers that made Gemini and Apollo possible were treated as tools to access numerical values for the equations of motion, combustion, strength of materials, and fluid dynamics. The hard part was the actual engineering, the numbers were just the result. Today we tend to treat the numbers as "engineering" an the arithmetic as a black box. Incredibly scary.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[IRstuff]

So, here's another vote for millennials, etc., not being that different:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/fashion/danah-boyd-cracking-teenagers-online-codes.html?mcubz=3

"The slide rules and machine-language computers that made Gemini and Apollo possible were treated as tools to access numerical values for the equations of motion, combustion, strength of materials, and fluid dynamics. The hard part was the actual engineering, the numbers were just the result. Today we tend to treat the numbers as "engineering" an the arithmetic as a black box. Incredibly scary."

We seem to have quickly forgotten that log tables of yore are essentially black boxes. This "today" notion is just a "good ole days" grouse; the instant we had programmable calculators, we made a bunch of black boxes to solve problems that might have take a hour or more to do by hand and reduced the time to solution to minutes or seconds. That "today" was 40 years ago. 35 years ago, "today" we made circuit analysis a black box, when programs such as SPICE and MSINC allowed us to use timeshare computing to crank circuit solutions for fairly complex circuits that would have taken days to analyze by hand. There were curmudgeonly engineers lamenting that those young "whippersnappers" treated circuit analysis like a black box and didn't understand the math and loop equations underlying all of that. This is the nature of progress, and we're standing on the shoulders of giants that stood on the shoulders of their giants. Does anyone really want to analyze anything more complicated than a simple Class A amplifier with Kirchhoff's equations and an SR-50 class scientific calculator. Can anyone realistically think that we could build any of the skyscrapers in Dubai using hand calculations?

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[zdas04]

IRstuff,
Good engineers have always and will always take steps to confirm that any tool will do the job that it is intended to do. When I picked up a pipeline model in 1984 (mainframe), I ran a bunch of cases to ensure that the model matched field conditions, and I made a couple of theoretical (simple) networks and calculated them by hand and applied that data to the model. If the model did not match reality to a pre-defined precision then I wouldn't use it. If it did match then I was happy to run networks that were far too complex to ever successfully run by hand. I do exactly the same thing today. The good engineers in this generation do the same thing. The bulk of engineers today (or when I started) take the model and put in their network and accept the output, even if it is nonsense. My oldest son is in an electronics class, and was designing a circuit for a class project. He used my approach to verify the modeling program that he was supposed to use, and it gave him a red flag on something that he knew was fine. After digging in he found that there was a glitch that didn't handle the input data properly if it wasn't in a certain (undocumented) sequence. He was careful to put his data in the "right" sequence and did well on the project. Others didn't and their outcome wasn't as good.

Good engineers understand the underlying assumptions behind the equations that they use and won't violate those assumptions. The run-of-the-mill engineers grab an equation and use it without ever thinking about the boundary conditions or the underlying assumptions. It has never been different.

I often scream about a "Modified Bernoulli" equation that is taught in (too) many engineering schools. Basically this concept takes the Bernoulli equation and adds a "head loss" term to apply it to pipelines. The Bernoulli Equation cannot be derived from first principles unless you add the assumption that friction and rotation are zero. You cannot prevent rotation in a pipeline, and without friction headloss is zero. Good engineers are offended by this (mis-)use of the very useful Bernoulli Equation. Tens of thousands of engineers use it every day in this bastardized form. That is not a generational thing. It is a basic competence thing.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I don't know if anyone in would want to use the skyscrapers in Dubai as a benchmark. They only have to stand long enough to burn down.

 

[IRstuff]

Yes, my point exactly. You said, "Today we tend to treat the numbers as "engineering" an the arithmetic as a black box. Incredibly scary." My point was that this is not a present day phenomenon.

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[zdas04]

I see your point now.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[solid7]

We all get our parent's guilt built into us. I was a "latchkey kid". We were America's bastard children. Everyone hated us when we entered the workforce. But many of us grew up, and became the bosses of those whom we annoyed. Eventually, like all people, we matured, and developed a more seasoned world view. Now it's the Millenials' turn. They'll build their issues into their children, and a new cultural paradigm will emerge. Everyone will hate them, as they hated their parents before them. Nothing they do in the autumn season of their lives will ever be right, or good enough. But the world will still turn.

Remember, folks - the world we build is for the future, not for us. It doesn't matter if they're different, or they don't do it like we always have. Every generation changes. I'm a little surprised that smart people can't understand this concept. (that's coming from one of the dumbest guys in the room)

 

[SAITAETGrad]

The only question facing Millennials is how much longer they have to watch 'boomers type with two fingers. Not long kids, not long.

 

[MFJewell]

The only question facing Millennials is how much longer they have to watch 'boomers type with two fingers. Not long kids, not long.

Some of us younger folks type with two fingers as well. Although the last typing test I took, I managed almost 60 wpm corrected.