Tales from the jar side: Older employees and younger managers, Advice McNuggets, Upcoming conferences, and funny tweets
Profound Dad joke: While you're waiting for the waiter ... you become the waiter.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of September 12 - 19, 2021. This week I taught my regular Managing Your Manager course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and spent a couple days in Cambridge, MA, recording an update to my Spring and Spring Boot Essentials video course.
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Older Employees and Younger Managers
This week I put together a new Medium article for the Pragmatic Programmers publication. It’s called Older Employees and Younger Managers. The editor there often removes my more inflammatory statements, for obvious reasons, but hey, this is my own newsletter, so I feel like I can get away with more. As I often say on the Groovy Podcast, nobody is listening anyway, so I can say what I want.
(The jarheads who read this newsletter are all brilliant, sophisticated, and far more attractive than the norm. They are also, I trust, quite forgiving of wild, unsupported, borderline slanderous statements about giant companies with large legal departments. And if I do get in trouble, isn’t that worth the price (free) of the newsletter subscription right there?)
As I’ve discussed in this newsletter before, I work in a field that skews very young. Here is a demographics figure from the most recent Stack Overflow survey, which I’ve included here before:
The number I care about is that if you add up all the percentages for respondents age 44 and younger, you see that nearly 90% of all developers are younger than 45. To me, at least, that’s a very young distribution.
Another number I included came from the age discrimination lawsuit at Google, which claimed the median age there was only 28. When I was in my twenties, that sounded very appealing. It implied that I could be very young and still have both respect and enormous opportunities.
Now I see that number is a huge red flag. With the caveat that I’ve never worked for Google (which I say here in deference to my lawyer wife, who naturally prefers I not wave red flags at bulls), that number now suggests to me that almost no one gets promoted beyond a certain low level. They hire a ton of young people right out of school and grind them into dust so that they leave within a few years. That fits with the non-compensation benefits they (supposedly) have on site, like an elite chef, ping-pong tables and exercise equipment, and even laundry service. They want kids who don’t have a life, “encourage” them to live there until they can’t take it anymore, then discard them, get another batch, and repeat the process.
Yikes. In my 20s maybe you could have paid me enough to do that, but certainly not now.
More generally, as the Baby Boom generation ages, those that remain in the workforce will inevitably start reporting to younger managers. Heck, it already happened to James Bond, of all people, in the movie Skyfall:
In the article, I noted a few differences between older workers and younger ones:
Older workers have institutional knowledge. They know why things were done in a particular way, not just how they work.
Older employers tend to be more consistent than younger ones.
Work-life balance matters to young people, but it becomes a non-negotiable requirement as you get older.
One of the biggest things I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve gotten older is:
Older employees can do anything younger ones can, just not as often or for as long.
We see this in sports all the time. Watch how Lebron James conserves his energy during the regular season, then picks his spots to take over in the playoffs. Older baseball pitchers are such a cliché they even have a term for them: wily veterans, who know how to pitch rather than just trying to blow away the hitters with sheer velocity.
By the way, I was going to include Tom Brady in that comparison, but I’ve decided that he’s such a bizarre freak of nature that I’m guessing when he turns 50, he’ll retire and his fellow aliens will come and return him to his home planet, so there’s not really a lot to learn there.
I made a couple of other points in the article, too. One is based on an old joke told by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait:
If you see Huey Lewis walking down the street, you don’t think, “Is that America’s number one rock star?” You think, “Is that a friend of my dad’s?”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that my normal reactions are interpreted by others differently. I first saw it in restaurants, when I once expressed frustration at the slowness of the kitchen, and the waitress seemed more upset than I expected. I never blame the waitstaff for issues with the kitchen. Instead, I realized she was thinking of me more as a parent than a peer, so any issues she had with her dad were getting projected on me, at least to some degree.
In the workplace, as an older employee, I realize that whenever I deal with a much younger supervisor, it’s a good idea to smile and show approval more than normal. I’m not trying to get involved in any parental issues, but it couldn’t hurt to try to minimize their impact if they exist, or even give the other person the approval they may need. The result can potentially turn into a warm, mentoring relationship. You never know.
Finally, I did point out one problematic issue that can arise with older employees — the tendency to go into what I like to call curmudgeon mode. A curmudgeon is defined as “seen it all; done it all; not impressed.” That’s hard to resist, especially when you see companies making the same mistakes over and over again during your career. The resulting negativity can infect the whole team if you’re not careful.
I deliberately try to resist curmudgeon mode, but sometimes I can’t help myself. For example, I have hazy memories from the distant past, when forest fires in California didn’t affect my air quality 3000 miles away, and the NFL regular season was only 14 games long and the Rams, Vikings, Cowboys, and Steelers all had their divisions wrapped up by October, and, believe it or not, we weren’t facing a world-wide pandemic perpetuated (at least in part) by people refusing to get vaccinated. Heck, I can even remember way back to when Tom Brady was just a rookie. It was a simpler time.
Advice McNuggets
The Pragmatic Programmers hired a publicity person a few months ago (Hi Erica!) and she asked me for five to ten “deep thoughts” from my book Help Your Boss Help You that she could tweet. I didn’t think my book fit that pattern, but I should have realized that any time I make a presentation on a topic it naturally breaks down into these Advice McNuggets, as I call them.
Here are few she’s tweeted so far:
I have no idea what that carved hand means, but hey, I’ll go with it.
Yeah, I’ve got a whole chapter on working through the chain of command rather than around it. At one time it contained a subsection called “Mark Cuban Is An Idiot,” but sadly they made me change the title. In the final draft, that section was called “How Not To Violate The Chain Of Command,” which is okay, but lacks the same punch. It also lacks the same likelihood of getting sued, which was no doubt the point.
I sent Erica the advice mcnuggets. She selects the royalty-free pictures. I’d like to believe that in this picture, the woman is the manager. I only hope she has both the title and the salary to go with it, which isn’t only 80% of that of her male subordinate sitting next to her. One can dream.
An awful lot has been written over the past 18 months about remote work. I only make the point that in order for your boss to keep your needs and desires in mind when making decisions, they can’t forget about you entirely. That’s why you need to maintain contact on a periodic basis.
More to the point, however, I like the picture of the guy presumably working in a T-shirt. I’ve taught many a class in a T-shirt and sweatpants, which I consider a substantial improvement over my previous style of coding naked, which I don’t do any more. As far as you know.
Erica is tweeting advice mcnuggets approximately once a day, and I sent her about a dozen, so they’ll keep coming for a while.
Upcoming Appearances
I was going to add some technical content from my session this week to update my Spring Boot Essentials course, but this newsletter is already getting long and I have some tech conferences coming up anyway. So instead let me mention them.
First, I’m appearing this week at ApacheCon At Home, their online conference.
My talk is on Thursday, in the Groovy track. It’s called Functional Programming in Java, Groovy, and Kotlin.
I mentioned last week that I’ll be giving lots of talks at next week’s New England Software Symposium, the first live No Fluff, Just Stuff event of the year. I was also informed this week that UberConf, the big destination event in Denver the week of October 5, is a go as well.
I’m giving, by last estimate, a countably infinite number of talks at UberConf. Seriously, the my complete list is here, and it’s a lot. But hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.
A few humorous tweets
Finally, let me throw in a few tweets that I thought were funny this week.
So many jokes in so little time, and none of them are actually jokes. Wow.
I have not yet inflicted that gag on my son, but don’t worry, I will.
Not enough people recognize the true down sides.
And finally:
Think about it. It’s partly an age check, because the relevant movie came out in 1984, but still.
For jarheads only
As a reminder, jarheads can get the ebook versions of Help Your Boss Help You at the Pragmatic Programmers using the coupon code 7bc968c446 at checkout for a 35% discount. The code is good until the end of September, 2021.
If you’re not a subscriber, that’s fine. You get to use the coupon too.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Managing Your Manager, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
Recorded an updated video for my Spring and Spring Boot course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
This week:
Introduction to the Gradle Build Tool, for Gradle, Inc.
ApacheCon presentation discussed above
NFJS Boston show, discussed above