Millenials and the hive mind
December 22, 2019My latest obsession is "what is the difference between millenials and gen Z-ers".
I am now full of theories about this - one more improbable than the next.
Basically - I see a lot of changes in my work place, based on the different attitude and behavior, and professional performance, of our youngest team members. Some things seem to go completely unchecked now, and I find no way to correct these. And some things seem to be done much more professionally - and I have no idea how they did it.
So - time to tune in more, what the "new generation" are all about, and how to get my voice heard, when talking with them.
This is especially important in the profession of coding - somehow it seems the newer generation has completely different attitude towards coding and computers.
My current theories are the following ( and may change even tomorrow ) :
People of my age are the oldest ones, who still remember times when internet was not comfortable and photoshopping was limited to the esoteric user case of can you see a ghost in this picture.
The younger generation had Instagram during their whole childhood. And Facebook. And Google.
This means many things. Firstly - as human beings are just as jealous and vindictive as they were in the past generations, it is always necessary to not to get rumors circulating about your persona. But - you need to be much more polite if you assume people can very easily circulate fake photoshopped pictures online, or start a whole war in you Facebook page. You don't only lose your reputation at school but your reputation everywhere - and some of that internet content you can't even remove yourself. So - better safe than sorry. This is my theory, why the young ones are unfailingly kind and would always smile at you. They have learned the hard way, that very very bad things happen to people, who anger the wrong people.
The ever-present option of "googling it" is a whole another story. As a computer scientist I know, how very empowering that is. A good search and bad search are miles apart - but your expertise in your field shows clearly in your ability to tell the difference between these two. You can easily tap into everyone's knowledge. In the past, you needed to know the answer to do well in life. Now you need to know how to formulate the question and what would a good answer probably look like. This leads the young ones to be much more comfortable when they actually have no idea - they can usually rest assured, that they could know the details quickly, should they decide to do so. And in the mean while - they are not going to let their poker face down, and actually divulge the fact that they don't know what to do or don't know what that means.
A continuation to the possibility of googling it is the expectation that computer programs understand humans. They are young - so they don't any more assume that humans need to adopt to computers but quite the opposite. They came to software development after the whole field had spent relentless 20 years in trying to make people less uncomfortable in front of their computer screens. Computers absolutely didn't understand humans - but nowadays it is often times quite the opposite. When using any program ( even IDEs ), the basic workflow nowadays is I wonder if there is a way to do this - and then pressing random key combinations, to magically hit the shortcut to the task required.
I use web browsers like this. One time, when somehow I had forgotten the shortcut to open new tab - I tried several combinations must have been something like this and managed to accidentally open a browser testing environment - where web pages could be tested for all smart phone sizes, tablet sizes and laptop sizes. Amazing !! That web browsers come with these kind of hidden features ! Mind blowing. Today, when I didn't remember the shortcut of "delete this user-name from the auto-completion list" ( I typed my email wrong into the field, and wanted to get rid of it ) - I was then naturally nervous of which kind of rabbit hole will open now when starting to test the key combinations. I got it on 3rd try - and no magic happened this time. Noteworthy is, however, that I still have no idea how did I do it - what is the shortcut to delete the wrongly-spelled username ? I just know I probably could do it again as it worked, and nothing bad happened.
I still remember the time when it was important to know how things are done, rarther than just having possibly a slight hunch. Nowadays we have computers which do include a lot of features to help us think and - like above - help us un-do things which we messed up. Shortcuts for oopsies - this is truly something.
So - in my mind, the era of fake news and instagram accounts and googling things and relying on hunch rather than knowledge is all the same phenomenon. I decided to call it the hive mind - and I mean by that, that the new generation puts their trust to the computer environment, like that would be their assistant brain - and leaves much of the decision-making to the internet, and to the readily-available helper functions of the software. Like we see the heroines and heros to do in the SciFi series, when they interact with their space shuttle repairs.
People are now more independent, as nobody needs to know anything. And true experts are the ones who know this looks like the correct solution - rather than remembering that by heart.
It is a huge shock to all these newcomers, how much hard work went into getting computers to be like this. The little ones almost faint, the first time they see "this is how you declare an array". Or "this is how you run your job in command line". How can there possibly be so many things done in the background ? It all felt so easy and natural.
They are the generation which don't know that computers used to be awkward.
They got used to tablets and fast internet. Took that for granted, and now, as they are participating to the development of the software, making all this "ease of use" to happen for us - cannot believe their eyes : how can it be, we need so many lines of code, to kindly factor the "human error" out of the work process.