Generation X vs Generation Y

I don’t want to get on a rant here, but I’m just some­one born very late in the baby boom. Frankly, I have more in com­mon with Gen­er­a­tion Y than with Gen­er­a­tion X. But both gen­er­a­tions have their faults. I saw this yes­ter­day, while I attended Peter Kay’s pre­sen­ta­tion on crowd sourc­ing at the May 2008 HTCA meet­ing. Peter kept ask­ing the audi­ence what web ser­vices they had used. The num­ber of hands got smaller with each ser­vice he named. Every­one had used Wikipedia. A few peo­ple knew about Twit­ter. Peter men­tioned a few sites I had never used, like InTrade and IdeaS­cale.

I was the only per­son who raised his hand for Ning, the social net­work­ing por­tal that hosts Tech­Hui and Peter’s lat­est project, HawaiiConCon.org. The Hon­olulu Advertiser’s arti­cle about the site is avail­able here. and I men­tioned Tech­Hui in my billso.com post on 31 March 2008.

The gen­er­a­tion gap

A few mem­bers of the audi­ence got ner­vous when Peter dis­cussed cor­po­rate wikis. I have heard and read sim­i­lar ques­tions as man­agers and aca­d­e­mics strug­gle to keep up with the dig­i­tal generation.

Tammy Erick­son has a top 10 list on Busi­ness Week with some excel­lent com­ments about gen­er­a­tional con­flicts in the workplace.

More of the pre­cious lit­tle snowflakes — and they’re so many of them in Gen X (the gen­er­a­tion born between 1965 and 1982) and Gen Y (those born between 1983 and 1997) — need to wake up and smell the cof­fee.

It’s not Star­bucks coffee.

It’s not even a maple nut crunch latte from the 7–11.

It’s Maxwell House scooped from the big blue can, brewed in a vat, sim­mered to the con­sis­tency of loose mud and served in a tiny sty­ro­foam cup.

If you’re lucky, you get a lit­tle red plas­tic stir stick and some Cof­fee­mate. Denis Leary would be proud of this coffee-flavored coffee.

And if you’re really lucky, some­one made some Sanka because you can’t han­dle the caffeine.

Life sucks and it’s not fair

Many Gen Xers are hit­ting the ceil­ing in in their climb up the cor­po­rate lad­der. There’s fewer CXO spots than there are Gen Xers. It’s not fair, but those stub­born folks in Gen­er­a­tion Jones (born between 1954 and 1964) got there first. Their heroes are folks like Bill Gates, who would blow off his Har­vard courses and try to make up the study time with end-of-the-term all-nighters.

It’s bad tim­ing as the chil­dren of Gen­er­a­tions X and Jones are going on to col­lege and get­ting jobs. Mem­bers of Gen­er­a­tion Y have feel­ings of enti­tle­ment and priv­i­lege that crash against a wall of indif­fer­ence and dis­be­lief in the real world.

The heroes of Gen­er­a­tion Y are peo­ple like Face­book founder Mark Zucker­berg, who has bragged about skip­ping most of his Har­vard art his­tory course while he built a Face­book pro­to­type. Zucker­berg passed that class after he built an online study guide that his class­mates poured their notes and con­tent into dur­ing the end of term read­ing period. Zucker­berg and Bill Gates dropped out of Har­vard, but Zucker­berg got rich much faster. See this New York Times arti­cle for more details.

Heli­copter parents

Gen Xers hate how the Gen­er­a­tion Y calls their par­ents to ask advice about every­thing from class sched­ules to work respon­si­bil­i­ties. It’s awk­ward when a col­lege student’s heli­copter par­ent calls a pro­fes­sor to inter­vene on their child’s behalf. It’s dumb­found­ing when this hap­pens in the work­place. This 2006 MSNBC arti­cle about heli­copter par­ents who man­age their chil­drens’ job searches is a great example.

The cur­rent reces­sion only makes mat­ters worse for all involved. The home equity line is tapped out. No one wants to buy that piece of invest­ment prop­erty that looked like a sweet deal 3 years ago. Bonuses aren’t as com­mon at work any­more. This year’s vaca­tion became next year’s vaca­tion, and that’s just a maybe.

And yes, they’re buy­ing Maxwell House and brew­ing their cof­fee at home.

Escape — if you can

There is hope. A few Gen Xers escape from cor­po­rate jobs to start their own small busi­nesses. But many of the Xers are uncom­fort­able with mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. Text mes­sag­ing and social net­work­ing are too much to han­dle. They can deal with their Net­flix queue, but email is more their speed.

Mem­bers of Gen­er­a­tion Y have kept up with the changes. Some Gen Xers are jeal­ous that their younger Gen­er­a­tion Y can nav­i­gate the Inter­net so eas­ily and use online ser­vices to find new opportunities.

Some mem­bers of Gen­er­a­tion Y are over­whelmed with com­mu­ni­ca­tions options. Just read their blogs and feel their pain as they real­ize that every­day life is hard. Read­WriteWeb has a great col­lec­tion of Gen­er­a­tion Y links and RSS feeds, along with a video and some addi­tional discussion.

But as I men­tioned on 19 May 2008 in this billso.com arti­cle, many Amer­i­cans don’t read blogs or send emails. To them, all of this con­flict between gen­er­a­tions may mean very lit­tle at all.

Images cour­tesy of Road­side Pic­tures and mark_the_legend_foster through a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Tagged as: communication, economy, entitlement, generation, generation-x, generation-y, management, rant, Starbucks, student, university, USA