Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label generations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label generations. Show all posts

Friday, July 07, 2023

Welcome To The Future

The Boomer Mantra:
  • Lunch is for wimps
  • Only the strong survive
  • Fuck it - I'll sleep when I'm dead
I am a master of the universe


Gen X Is in Charge. Don’t Make a Big Deal About It.

The original “latchkey kids” are grown up, in the boss’s seat and ready to make the rules. If that’s OK?


The average age of incoming C.E.O.s is around 54. While American government remains squarely in the hands of baby boomers — and while its leadership, at least in certain branches, becomes noticeably older — corporate boardrooms are undergoing a transition. It’s Gen X’s moment, that generation most known for being crowded out of sweeping cultural age analyses by millennials on one end and boomers on the other.

Or as Patton Oswalt, a Gen X comedian, put it: “Gen X is trending, which probably means that, uh … eh, whatever. Nevermind.”

There are plenty of fair critiques of those generational analyses. People are far more complicated than the year they were born — in Gen X’s case, some time between 1965 and 1980. But it’s still true that with new leaders often come new rules. For the country’s newest chief executives, that has meant more trust in flexible and informal ways of working.

Take Darby Equipment, a manufacturing company in Tulsa, where remote flexibility for years seemed like an alien concept. The former chief executive, Bob Darby, reigned the company, a family business, with a commitment to an in-person regimen. People were expected to show up on time, sit at their desks and stay until evening, no matter what was going on in their personal lives.

His sons, Ryan and Bobby Darby, nudged their father to consider when he might step down. But the elder Mr. Darby couldn’t imagine the company functioning without him. Employees called him the “pacesetter”: He arrived every morning before 8 a.m., which encouraged others to do the same. When Mr. Darby’s sons asked him whether he’d like to carve out more time for golfing and fishing, he scoffed at the idea.

“He was basically telling us he didn’t think we were going to be able to keep all the balls in the air,” said Ryan Darby, 47.

During the pandemic, the elder Mr. Darby decided to retire. His sons stepped into company leadership with a fresh set of notions about where and when the work could get done. They’re more comfortable with some employees working remotely.

The labor force participation of people over 55 was near its lowest rate in 15 years last fall. And the average age of incoming chief executives has been on the decline.

Research from Stanford points to generational divides on remote work. Workers over 55 (mostly boomers) prefer to work remotely around 35 percent of the time, while workers in their early twenties (Gen Z) preferred to be remote about 45 percent of the time and workers in their 30s and 40s preferred to work from home closer to half the time. In other words, Gen Xers have become the unlikely warriors for flexible work.

Of course, stage of life comes into play. A survey of 120,000 American workers, also from Stanford, found that desired remote work levels were 7 percent higher among those living with children under 18.

“Gen X are the latchkey kids — we grew up very independent,” said Robert Glazer, 47, the founder of the marketing company Acceleration Partners. “Gen X was one of the first generations to expect a little more from work, trying to set boundaries but not expecting the workplace to change around them.”

When companies were first calling people back to the office, many assumed that the youngest workers would be the most rebellious. The reality has been more complicated. In many cases, executives say, young people are eager to be back in the office and surrounded by colleagues, while middle-aged employees with child and elder care responsibilities are fighting to keep their afternoon freedoms.

David Burkus, a consultant and the author of “Under New Management,” advises dozens of companies on management issues, including return-to-office plans. He’s seen firsthand the generational divisions underlying them. This was particularly salient for a law firm he recently consulted for to send some 700 lawyers back to the office.

“Baby boomers, who were predominantly empty nesters, were pushing to get people back in the office,” he said. “Then you had Gen Xers and geriatric millennials pushing for flexibility.”

“I went into it expecting it to be clear that the younger you are, the more flexibility you want,” he added. “I didn’t find that.”

Joy Meier, who runs human resources for the 4,000 employees at E2open, a supply chain software company, has also watched those generational differences unfold as she surveyed employees about their return-to-office preferences.

Ms. Meier, 49, found that many young workers wanted to be in person, sometimes even five days a week, describing a sense of loneliness at home and an eagerness to jump start their careers; a handful even departed the company in pursuit of more in-office time. Many senior employees wanted to be in the office, too, because that was how they’d spent their whole lives. (Some also had less comfort with technology.) Then there were the Gen Xers, like Ms. Meier, who has four children at home and embraced the company’s hybrid policy, which requires most staffers to come in three days a week.

“There’s definitely more of a desire for flexibility among people who are advanced in their careers and have family commitments,” she said.

She recalled years before the pandemic watching a female colleague anxiously negotiate for the ability to leave the office at 3 p.m. to pick up her children from school. “She was so happy when her boss approved that,” Ms. Meier said. “That was a unique thing back then.”

At Darby Equipment, the company’s new pacesetter is Aaron Soto, the director of operations. Mr. Soto, 44, is also sensitive to the workplace’s shifting generational norms. He recognizes that some of the junior employees want positive reinforcement frequently, he said, so he keeps a spreadsheet tracking how many thank-you cards each employee has received from managers.

Of course, talking about generational divisions can easily backslide into finger pointing. Management experts point out that most of the variance in workplace performance isn’t about how old someone is, but how good their boss is. Broad generational brushstrokes can paper over the deeper conversations needed between workers and their bosses.

“The single best predictor for whether folks will succeed at work is the competence of their boss, regardless of generation,” said Melissa Nightingale, a co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training firm. “That boss is on the hook for their on-boarding, their feedback, their career growth and more. If the boss can’t do those things, they’re screwed.”

Still, when old bosses leave and new ones arrive, there are opportunities for rethinking. Workers who benefit from leaving the office early for school pickup can say so. Workers who want more feedback can ask for it. There’s a chance to look at the way things have always been done and ask: Why?

“A lot of experts make it sound like you’re putting people in boxes based on their birth year, but what we want people to understand is that generations are clues, not a box,” said Jason Dorsey, a workplace researcher. “Just because you’re born in a certain year doesn’t mean someone knows everything about you.”

Generations change as they grow up, too. For years, Gen X seemed defined by a vexed sense of aimlessness. As Winona Ryder’s character in “Reality Bites” puts it: “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.” The angst, for many, is fading. Cue a sense of workplace confidence; they became something.

Twilla Brooks, 48, recalled that when she was starting her career, as an assistant buyer for Robinsons-May, a former department store chain, she had to be in the office before her boss arrived and stay until her boss left. She raced through Los Angeles traffic before 8 a.m., petrified of letting her manager down, because in her words: “That was what you needed to do in order to make it.”

Last year, Ms. Brooks left an executive role at Walmart to start her own marketing company. Now, with no office, she decides where and when to work. “There’s a lot more flexibility in my schedule,” she said. “Because it’s my schedule.”

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Today's Fuddy Duddy

... from way back in the day - when kids were getting a little pop-crazy and parents were getting a little worried about all this change that's happening so fast ... 

Which, I think, is normal. Isn't that how this shit's supposed to work?

"These kids today" always worry their parents - what with their ukuleles and their ragtime music, and their boogie woogie and their bobby socks, and their halter tops and their peace signs - it's just too much for good and sensible folks who've managed either to forget about all the weird shit they did as teenagers, or remember all too well, so they feel really bad about having been so recklessly rebellious and are now terrified that their kids might be doing some of things they did back in the day.

A little selective amnesia mixed in with a kind of self-righteous pearl-clutching (ie: "We just don't want our kids making the same mistakes we made"), makes for some pretty strange-sounding rhetoric and unnecessary conflict.

The kids are alright.


The more things change - y'know?

Australia 1964:

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Today I Learned



The Genome of a Human From an Unknown Population Has Been Recovered From Cave Dirt

A cup of mud that has been buried beneath the floor of a cave for millennia has just yielded up the genome of an ancient human.

Analysis reveals traces of a woman who lived 25,000 years ago, during the last ice age; and, although we don't know much about her, she represents a significant scientific achievement: the feasibility of identifying ancient human populations even when there are no bones to recover.

The sample also yielded DNA from wolf and bison species, which an international team of scientists were able to place in the context of their population histories.

"Our results," they wrote in their paper, "provide new insights into the Late Pleistocene genetic histories of these three species and demonstrate that direct shotgun sequencing of sediment DNA, without target enrichment methods, can yield genome-wide data informative of ancestry and phylogenetic relationships."

The recovery of ancient DNA has typically relied rather a lot on bones, and luck. First, you need the bones to have survived, and survived intact enough to preserve DNA over many thousands of years.

Then you need to be able to find them, and recover enough genetic material for sequencing. It's painstaking work, but rewarding - ancient DNA is able to fill a lot of gaps in the evolutionary history not just of humans, but other life as well.

A lot of archaeological sites have more evidence of hominid use than bones, however. The cave of Satsurblia in Georgia is one such site. Artifacts such as stone tools survive the rigor of time better than bones, so it's not surprising. Even so, the cave was used by ancient humans for thousands of years, and yet only a single individual's genome from the site had ever been sequenced, from a human that lived 15,000 years ago.

Environmental DNA, that can be found preserved in the sediment, is increasingly looking like an excellent way to learn more about the past. It is deposited in feces, as we saw with the recovery of ancient bear DNA earlier this year, or fragments of bone that have been ground to dust.

So a team of scientists led by evolutionary biologist Pere Gelabert and archaeologist Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna in Austria went looking for environmental DNA in Satsurblia cave. They obtained six soil samples and carefully sifted through them, looking for traces of genetic material.

They found them in the form of mitochondrial DNA. Fragmentary and incomplete, but, once painstakingly pieced together, sufficient to yield new information about the populations that once inhabited the region.

First, the woman. Only a tiny fraction of her genome was recovered, but from that, the researchers were able to infer that she was a member of a previously unknown group of modern humans. That group is now extinct, but it contributed to present day populations in Europe and Asia, as discovered when the ancient genome was compared to current human genomes.


- more -

Monday, October 01, 2012

The Ring Of Truth

From Addicting Info:
The economy is hiding the fact that employers are not getting their way as often as they’d like. With four jobless applicants for every open position, companies can pick and choose. But they are choosing older and older workers, which is creating for them a long-term problem as these workers will not be available in another 10-20 years. And they know this.
But the Republican candidates clearly do not. To Paul Ryan, through his Ayn Rand tinted glasses, the new generation needs to be in the workplace slaving away for their corporate overlords for just enough money to pay for scraps of food and a run down apartment. They should be grateful for the scraps that fall from the table of the élite. And their lack of gratitude is a moral failing in Ryan’s world view.
Those darned kids.