The affinity for bleeding edge, and working higher up the stack, is not a genz specific trait, it's every younger developer since the beginning of developers. Every next generation goes through this and rediscovers all the concepts the previous generation did.
Thanks for writing this - I guessed from the headline these would be in the conclusions, and agree it’s a general trait of less experienced developers.
It's the same with life in general... An old geezer can tell you all his wisdom when you're 22 and you will listen and understand, but it will still take a long time to really "get it". It's weird like that.
When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist...
But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me.
I looked directly into the trap after it was opened.
Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it!
As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.
Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job.
Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware.
The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries.
Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
I think that also had to do with communication being much harder and internet ressources not being widely available yet since fewer had access to computer systems. Otherwise there probably would have been some popular synthwave script language that is optimized for vinyl storages.
So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable.
I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company. IMO I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal which means more money or more benefits.
> So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company.
Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier. You could get some stable job and coast and do fine in the economy 20-30 years ago. I think your sympathies for the way us gens X/Y approached jobs 10 years ago is misdirected (though I suspect a lot of Millenials, especially those such as myself who aren't highly compensated, are taking a more individualistic approach to their careers now as well)
Gen Z is out here trying to survive and they've gotten an incredibly raw deal, I'd sympathize with them instead.
Senior leadership will word it more diplomatically; but that is the only mindset that makes sense for them. Once you have the power to choose to add or remove resources from a project it doesn't make sense to interact with the company in any way other than transacting skills and time for money. Except people with substantial equity stakes, for obvious reasons. One of the tells of a high-performing management culture is everyone can do their job in working hours with the skills that they have formal training in.
There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.
Unless I misunderstand you, this would mean "leadership" translates to "my time is valued at $xyz per hour which I can get at companies A, B and C, but I love company D so much I will work for them for less than that". Or alternatively, "leadership" means "leaving money on the table because of a feeling of loyalty towards a corporation"?
You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.
Companies have limited leadership opportunities for developers. It's pointless trying to make everyone a leader when there's 1 leadership position for every 20 developers.
Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".
Software developer compensation spans a very wide range, especially in the USA. Devs with the same years of experience could be earning anywhere from $50k on the low end to $500k on the high end in the same city. The "upward mobility" across the range is relatively easy and not hindered by your credentials (i.e. you aren't permanently barred from the highest end jobs because you didn't do your undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton).
The fact that the USA allows immigration means that this compensation range applies globally. A dev in Tallinn earning €80k can aspire for the $500k role in San Francisco and actually have a decent shot of getting it.
It's almost unreasonable to expect employees to remain loyal in this situation.
The phenomenon where people stayed in the same job forever happened because they couldn't really go anywhere else to make more. Indeed, at high-paying tech companies, you will find many devs who have been there for decades.
IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.
Naturally this reflects onto businesses, which of course are made and run by people. Loyalty to employees and vice versa is gone in favour of getting the better deal.
> IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.
I disagree, loyalty in friendship or with your family is not worth less. Being loyal to human being is not stupid, for me it's being loyal to a company or a brand that is.
When being loyal to your close ones, you create trust and for me this is critical of my hapiness.
I don't get anything from being loyal to a company.
I don't fully understand your comment, are you implying that older generations were able to buy a house in their 20s because they were loyal to their companies?
Is this genuine wonderment? The state of housing in western countries has been discussed at great length and it's disingenuous to compare that across generations, whereas the state of working and how companies treat you has stayed the same, or gotten worse (as we've seen lately).
A bit of advice for the author: If you want to get votes for you poll, then don't require participants to subscribe to your newsletter. I see it as a waste of my time.
I teach electronics and programming at an art school/university. One trend I have noticed is that young people have increasingly unrealistic expectations how difficult certain things are. I blame DIY youtube/tiktok for this — you know the kind where it looks very simple, as if it takes a minute and boof you have a cool thing.
I often have to explain to them why the thing that they saw working for 2 seconds in that tiktok clip will likely not work unattended for their full day exhibition weekend.
But those are some people from that generation, there are just as many that just want to learn and don't want to take shortcuts.
I agree however that overestimating your own abilities is a generic trait of you g people regardless of generation — but that is how they learn — how we all learned.
> Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations,
In general people protest when they can't just change things on their own terms. Arguably older generations have less of the issue (but really, they like to yell at the clouds like everyone else IMHO)
> not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
Someone with enough experience will be better at masking these traits and not have their process violations or risk taking surface too much.
Either it's completely transparent to everyone and people don't even acknowledge it as process violations (e.g. the more experienced worker just happens to have higher permissions and can officially do whatever they want. Staying 3 or 4 years at a place will give you an amount of permissions that wouldn't make sense on paper for your role) or they know how to stay under the radar.
> “From my old-school perspective, they are somewhat entitled, expecting flexibility, yearly raises and promotions – even when the company has no need for more managers, for example. They also expect significant benefits on top of our higher-than-market pay.
> As many before me have said, they have cast off outdated expectations of ‘loyalty’ to jobs that aren't loyal to them, in return. It's admirable for the most part, though I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.”
> – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US)
That's been the de facto for a while and now it's just gone. Second part is wild
As a Gen Zer myself, parts of this rubbed me the wrong way in the sense that it feels like many gen X/boomers are applying the mindset that got them their success in their early life is still relevant today.
We've become jaded growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in - in my home country we have massive cost of living increases, ever-nascent climate change, housing shortages and income inequality, aging population combined with policy changes that make life better for the boomer generation.
Many of my peers have given up hope that they will ever be able to buy their own home. We're stressed, lonely, and are a generation of test subjects to big-tech's addiction machines.
Working in tech has it's benefits and I am lucky to not be faced with many of these issues personally, but I know plenty of people my age and younger that have gone past the stage of "terrified for the world their kids will grow up in" and into a numb subsistence.
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When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist...
But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me.
I looked directly into the trap after it was opened.
Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it!
As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware.
The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries.
Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier. You could get some stable job and coast and do fine in the economy 20-30 years ago. I think your sympathies for the way us gens X/Y approached jobs 10 years ago is misdirected (though I suspect a lot of Millenials, especially those such as myself who aren't highly compensated, are taking a more individualistic approach to their careers now as well)
Gen Z is out here trying to survive and they've gotten an incredibly raw deal, I'd sympathize with them instead.
I'm curious what years you think this applies to.
All I remember is a constant fear of cancer, AIDS, and massive unemployment.
This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.
There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.
Please correct me if I misunderstood you.
Could've ended that sentence there and it would better reflect 99% of organisations, while also explaining part of the attitude you're referring to.
Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".
Most people will self-develop anyway, and at some point you'll need somebody to fill that leadership position anyway.
So this is not a problem.
Things change constantly, such is life, we'll get used to it.
Software developer compensation spans a very wide range, especially in the USA. Devs with the same years of experience could be earning anywhere from $50k on the low end to $500k on the high end in the same city. The "upward mobility" across the range is relatively easy and not hindered by your credentials (i.e. you aren't permanently barred from the highest end jobs because you didn't do your undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton).
The fact that the USA allows immigration means that this compensation range applies globally. A dev in Tallinn earning €80k can aspire for the $500k role in San Francisco and actually have a decent shot of getting it.
It's almost unreasonable to expect employees to remain loyal in this situation.
The phenomenon where people stayed in the same job forever happened because they couldn't really go anywhere else to make more. Indeed, at high-paying tech companies, you will find many devs who have been there for decades.
Naturally this reflects onto businesses, which of course are made and run by people. Loyalty to employees and vice versa is gone in favour of getting the better deal.
I disagree, loyalty in friendship or with your family is not worth less. Being loyal to human being is not stupid, for me it's being loyal to a company or a brand that is.
When being loyal to your close ones, you create trust and for me this is critical of my hapiness.
I don't get anything from being loyal to a company.
edit: typo
Young people are much more likely to protest, have unrealistic expectations, not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
I often have to explain to them why the thing that they saw working for 2 seconds in that tiktok clip will likely not work unattended for their full day exhibition weekend.
But those are some people from that generation, there are just as many that just want to learn and don't want to take shortcuts.
I agree however that overestimating your own abilities is a generic trait of you g people regardless of generation — but that is how they learn — how we all learned.
In general people protest when they can't just change things on their own terms. Arguably older generations have less of the issue (but really, they like to yell at the clouds like everyone else IMHO)
> not follow process, behave unpredictably and take risks.
Someone with enough experience will be better at masking these traits and not have their process violations or risk taking surface too much.
Either it's completely transparent to everyone and people don't even acknowledge it as process violations (e.g. the more experienced worker just happens to have higher permissions and can officially do whatever they want. Staying 3 or 4 years at a place will give you an amount of permissions that wouldn't make sense on paper for your role) or they know how to stay under the radar.
> As many before me have said, they have cast off outdated expectations of ‘loyalty’ to jobs that aren't loyal to them, in return. It's admirable for the most part, though I do not think everyone should get raises/promotions every year in a small company.”
> – Head of Product at a startup (Millennial, US)
That's been the de facto for a while and now it's just gone. Second part is wild
This is the exact opposite of what I've found, and what other older engineers and engineering managers I personally know have found.
In genreal we find GenZ to be overly sensitive to technical critisism, and unwilling to speak bluntly about technical ramifications.
This point alone makes me doubt the entire article...
We've become jaded growing up in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in - in my home country we have massive cost of living increases, ever-nascent climate change, housing shortages and income inequality, aging population combined with policy changes that make life better for the boomer generation.
Many of my peers have given up hope that they will ever be able to buy their own home. We're stressed, lonely, and are a generation of test subjects to big-tech's addiction machines.
Working in tech has it's benefits and I am lucky to not be faced with many of these issues personally, but I know plenty of people my age and younger that have gone past the stage of "terrified for the world their kids will grow up in" and into a numb subsistence.
They will resent you for whatever you did or didn't, and you will judge them for not understanding or (not) doing XYZ.