Most of the Gen-Y's that I've worked with have been pretty intelligent, but very arrogant and largely useless, because they hide their inexperience behind their arrogance and claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.
> claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.
I wonder about that. When LiveJournal first had its scaling difficulties in 2002, anyone with any experience in programming kinda rolled their eyes at what Brad was doing and thought "This college kid doesn't have a clue." I mean, writing the whole app in Perl? Relying on MySQL boxes that went down frequently and usually took a whole cluster with them? Walking clusters to build a page? Putting your object traversal logic in the app instead of convenient SQL queries?
Everybody knows that the way to build a scalable webapp is to write in Java or C++, buy an Oracle database and leverage the thousands of man-years they've put into making it perform well on top-end hardware clusters, use stored procedures and constraints to offload processing to that database, and getting a big SAN for storage. Scalable webapps were a solved problem in 2002: after all, EBay and Amazon had done it, as had dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
Fast-forward to 2008. Now, memcached is standard scaling procedure. Federation among dozens of cheap MySQL boxes is standard procedure, with boxes arranged as master/master pairs to deal with the pesky failure problems. Everybody uses commodity hardware, and big server vendors like Sun and IBM are in serious trouble.
I think the real issue is that young workers have much stronger economic incentives to embrace disruptive technologies. They have more work years ahead of them and less investment in existing technologies, so it makes a lot of sense for them to choose technologies that suck now but will (or could) be big in a couple years, because if their bet pays off, they're suddenly on a level playing field with people 20 years their senior.
It's not always blind exuberance, arrogance, and inexperience that makes young people choose new technologies that are "worse" than their old alternatives. They could be taking a very shrewd (and unverbalized, if they're that smart) "fuck off, elders" risk.
Sometimes that's true. However, it usually isn't, and the gen-y's usually can't admit it when they're wrong.
Most of the gen-y's I've worked with produced utter crap, and I've left a few jobs now because I got tired of fixing their stuff while they were busy taking credit for it.
