Which kind of shame do you feel when I say "computer" ?
December 22, 2019There is a lot of talk about "boomers" "gen-Xers" "millenials" and "gen-Zers".
To me, most of the heated discussions of the topic are irrelevant.
I have already made peace with my parents - even so far that I am now the carer of my parents.
They place their trust in me. While most my friends are filling their houses with toddlers and babies, I keep an eye of the gen-Z via my boyfriend's kids, who happen to be already teenagers.
In short - I have made my peace with all generations : I have god-children in the alpha, kids living with me in gen-Z, me belonging to millenials, boyfriend belonging to gen-X, and parents belonging to boomers.
In the work place these differences are visible
In the work place, me being a coder - these differences are very visible, though !
It is quite remarkable how high everyone respects the gen-Xers and boomers who know how to code. Everyone knows these dudes were there when Commodore 64 was all there was. And even before that ! Teach me, master.
The young ones are a bit frantic, and freak out every time you try to give them something else than fully functional GUI. Testing software with them leads to a lot of "binary feedback", where you only get "oh, it worked perfectly", or "oh, I gave up, as I couldn't make it work".
This is how I use the generations in my code testing :
- Boomers to test GUIs ( if they cannot mess them up - nobody can ! )
- Gen-Xers to test command line functionalities, and completeness of user manuals ( preferably people with no coding experience ) - they are so freaked out by command line, that they will accidentally panic and break it.
- Millenials to make sure the technology I have chosen is not utterly old-fashioned, and that my coding style is approximately professional.
- Gen-Zers to test the color-coding of user manuals ( they expect very clear high-lighting of key concepts ) - leading to manuals decipherable in 10 seconds or less.
This might be wrong of me ( and is naturally an over-simplification ),
but why not ?
Now - why did I write "shame" to the title of the post ?
Boomers and gen-Xers feel piercing shame when asked to "do something on computer", and readily say "I have no confidence in even trying this". Once you get them started, they give you Excellent bug reports - as they diligently follow ( even completely stupid ) instructions, and find all kinds of weird behavior from the programs.
Millenials buckle up and expect "all will go horribly wrong, but at least I will learn a thing or two in the process". They find bugs ( but not as well as Boomers and gen-Xers ), and may accidentally copy the source code and fix the bug, without remembering to report that to the Actual Dev at all.
Gen-Zers start readily and think "all will go peachy" - and feel the piercing shame only later : when they suddenly cannot "carry out the task they set up to do". This makes them more resilient to "mildly buggy programs" as they avoid "non-functional features", but makes their feedback hard to decipher, when it comes to "early production" releases. Glitches and bugs cause these young users to "feel ashamed", and the error message is never forwarded to the dev. Instead the self-esteem of the gen-Zer ( who was supposed to "be in sync with all machines" ) gets severely shaken.
My noble task at work, I feel, is to enable all of us !
So - why not to use boomers and Xers to find all issues, millenials to ensure code sanity, and Zers to ensure the "intuitiveness" of the resulting product ?
Might be wrong and insensitive - but for me, these stereotypes have worked miracles !