quote:

Originally posted by arfmel:

I bet that growing up, they didn’t receive a trophy for showing up at school.

Nope, they watched their families be murdered by the communists.

In my experience, meritocracy has been removed from dictionaries. People get hired / promoted now based on quotas rather than merit.

You can't teach work ethic.

Labor participation rate now at 61 percent. 39 percent not working or looking for job

quote:

Originally posted by Mars_Attacks:
...

Heck, I allow overtime. All you can handle.

...

I'm trying to GIVE this skill to my assistants for FREE, the keys to my kingdom. They don't want them. Nope. They want to get paid expert wages by the company to learn this.

When I was younger, the older coworkers NEVER tried to teach me, in fact they kept all skills to themselves in a jealous secret. I had to pay for the classes and learn on my own.

Damn. Maybe you're too generous, I don't know. (What is it with older guys keeping any knowledge secret? Generational thing? Union thing?)

Couple of years ago I was looking to make a bit of a lateral move out of being an admin of a flavor of Unix that's dying (yes, I was a sysadmin). I wound up taking a job as a junior dba. The manager, an old database expert, who hired me had had a hell of a time trying to hire experienced dba's and getting credentialed morons instead. So he proposed to hire someone competent (a sysadmin) and teach them. Ok I'm your guy.

He wound up hiring me and one other former sysadmin. Then he didn't teach shit, he kept his knowledge to himself and played stupid guessing games instead. So we learned on our own, on our own time. Salaried workers, what's overtime? Shortly after we were hired the last of the credentialed moron 'real dbas' left. By which point we'd learned enough to know, for sure, how absolutely incompetent those guys were.

Then the manager, ever the professional, who'd been spending way too much time and energy playing office politics, had something blow up in his face, panicked, and quit on the spot. Leaving the company with its only dbas two junior guys who he had promised to train but hadn't. He didn't even leave us all the passwords. We did fine, in fact things got better.

So after 4 years with the company I'm not the junior guy I'm the senior guy and team lead with one guy under me, who we hired fresh out of college. Other former sysadmin moved on, got a promotion and raise to work elsewhere as a dba. We still keep in friendly touch, in fact before he left he was the one who'd made the decision on the new guy (good call) and keeps in touch with him too. The new guy is a serious self starter, I don't *need* to teach him anything technical he learns it on his own cause he wants to. All I really do is offer practical tips I picked up the hard way in 20+ years doing computer shit.

So now I do a better job with one guy under me than 'database expert' did with 4 guys.

In IT you have to always, always be learning new things, usually conpletely on your own and unpaid because while *working* overtime is expected getting paid for overtime is unknown. Or else you can't keep up because things are always changing. And there are still kids who can handle that fine.

And in the real world sometimes you even need to accept a slight demotion in order to make a change, then you learn shit and work your way back up.

The kids working for me still haven't figured out that I don't work hard because I get paid; I get paid because I work hard.

In my experience many boomers are information hoarders because they think it gives them power. They also use way too much email and cannot grasp the idea that other forms of communication and information sharing methods can be better depending on the situation. They like watching younger people bump into walls as they feel their way around and justify it by saying they had to learn on their own too.

Then there are the millennials that don't take the time to learn anything and whenever they are presented with a new assignment they promptly call a meeting of the entire team to "collaboratively" get everyone else to do the work for them.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lefty Sig,