Stop assuming that these people are competent. I've been in the c-suite meetings where these things are decided and it boils down to "In my day the office was good enough for me, so it will be good enough for everyone else too".

Equally, stop assuming that their intent is good. Unless we have internal details, we can argue either way, but assuming anything at all seems wrong. Just as likely as they're just stupid, it feels as likely they're doing it to reduce costs/headcount.

Being disconnected from reality, or not being able to adapt is not the same as being stupid.

One of my bosses while being absurdly smart for work related things, has no clue about how to deal with millenials and younger. He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above. The younger laugh and leave

That's really nothing new. Most people get to a point where they don't quite understand the generations behind them.

You grow up in a different time with different norms. It may be easy enough to understand at a more surface level what younger generations seem to care about, how they talk, etc but it's much harder to deeply understand what it's like to be that younger generation and how, therefore, to fundamentally adjust the way you work and interact or even view the world yourself.

Another angle that makes this even more complicated is that younger people can and do get things wrong too. A fresh perspective is not automatically a correct perspective. A leader would be rightfully wary about letting someone experiencing their first transition into the workforce make major decisions about workplace design, etc.

Of course, this leads to the opposite problem of never trusting the younger generations, which is equally if not more problematic. Because a fresh perspective may not always be correct, but often it does have some kind of value that needs to be extracted and acted on.

Of course a fresh perspective is not always correct. In fact, they usually get things wrong for lack of experience. And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL) and adore the latest hype. But we seniors should be open to their opinions, and we should be open to mix with them and "exploit" their strength. E.g. our social media (Twitter, Insta and Facebook mainly) are handled by a ~50 y.o. woman who volunteered. People younger than 35'ish laugh about how lengthy the posts and the videos are, and the general tone of "Buscemy: how do you do, fellow kids?", lack of social networks that are actually used, and so on. But nobody asked them for advise, because nobody wants to be told how old and out of the loop they are.

On a more serious note, they can't take seriously they have to be available on weekends or holidays, so they prefer to change jobs rather than confronting or negotiate with their manager. It looks that our future is one of overworked seniors training short term juniors for our competition: extintion in 10-15 years.

Recently one of our juniors asked for a day per week working from home, and was denied because "team building" or something like that. Since them, I have the impression he's on a quest on how many days per week he can go without talking to anyone (avoiding team building), and I'm 100% sure he's now hunting for a fully remote job.

>And they tend to dismiss good old tech (like SQL)

I was there when we gave up on SQL. It wasn't because we wanted to. It was because we had a terabytes of data that needed to be accessed in micro-seconds.

SQL in 2006 was simply incapable of that. Looking at what a modern machine can do is ridiculous by comparison. Try and do it on a 8 year old phone and you will have as close to the experience we had back then.

I've also seen it go the other way, with leads trusting more junior engineers way more than they probably should have. I wasn't too surprised when most (all?) of the concerns that senior engineers raised and were overruled on came back to bite them 6 months later.

In that instance it seemed like leadership was focusing too hard on making sure the more junior members had their voices heard and, I think, expected that the team would be able to just figure out how to handle the concerns raised later. Pros and cons to everything, but at least in that one instance it was really odd to see senior engineers' proposals and reasoning be thrown out with a focus almost entirely on protecting team dynamics or something similar.

Also, diversity more broadly, not just generation.

Scenario: Say you're a Zoomer, affluent parents, everything material you could want, security and opportunity, all the college prep and application angles covered, Stanford, Leetcode, FAANG, substantial war chest, now founder, family seed money and connections and safety net... designing a consumer tech product targeted foremost at "other" Zoomers in general...

In that scenario, you're going to have huge cultural blind spots, among your generation.

You might be best off throwing away the well-to-do fratbro culture-fit hiring funnel, and hopefully get a diversity of perspectives.

Diversity of thought should have always been the goal. That's really hard to do though, especially when you can instead focus on easily noticed external traits and claim that's diversity.

Throwing away the well-to-do fratbro hiring funnel would actually be a mistake though, wouldn't it? We should be adding more, different hiring funnels to try to better capture diversity of thought and background. Throwing out one funnel entirely and replacing it with another would still have a blindspot, it's just the opposite blindspot that they had before.

> He still lives in the world of loyalty to the corporation, and it works with X-gen and above.

That only barely worked when corporations were a little bit loyal to employees. There's not one of those left now.

To be clear, I'm from Spain, and that loyalty is still a selling item among 40-and-over. Also, seniority is a plus almost everywhere, where you can win arguments with "I've been working here twenty years", even to people the same age than you but with less seniority. Going to other place even with higher salary is a loss for lots of people.

But youngers doesn't care, and I have the impression they actually fear being for too long, say more than 5 years, in the same place. They value the novelty of knowing new people and ways to get stuff done.

Chatting with some major-firm management consultants was enough to remove any lingering “… but surely they’re smarter than I’m giving them credit for” doubts I had about the C-suite.

Their view was way less favorable and more comprehensive than mine, and they’ve seen more of them and from bigger companies than I have. They talked about them like they’re toddlers.

Exactly

Human psychology is wild, when employees do something unusual, it is always presumed that it’s because they are stupid or lazy

When executives do something unusual, it’s rarely assumed that they’ve lost touch with reality and factory floor. Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity

> Responsibility never seems to land on them in personal and individual capacity

Somewhat because people don't want to know that the people who lead them are idiots. They'll go so far as to bury their heads in the sand to not hear it.

Ye that does seem to be the case. If we are led by idiots, then that means we are idiots too for allowing this to happen

This is how some of it spreads.

But excel models of operating costs have stronger staying power than CEO fads, at least from my experience.

Yep, with a dash of "All my work goes better in face-to-face meetings, so everyone else's must too."

This person gets it. Been in the room for many years and it's never the conspiracy people think it is, it's never that deep.

"Our most important work happens during on the back of napkin meetings" has been said unironicly

Same with "Our most important business conversations happen spontaneously at the water cooler."

Wow, you still have an expense budget for routine employee lunches such that you’re doing work out at restaurants and stuff!? /s

Doesn't that explanation makes very little sense in this context? We're talking about a company that just spun out on its own and has an enormous amount of work ahead of it and presumably a window of time where the investors expect things to be bumpy financially—why would a CEO intentionally try to reduce headcount in that situation? A year in when things have settled down, sure, but right after the split?

I should note that we've had a huge amount of redundancies on top of people leaving for other opportunities. My guess is they want a very low-cost business that looks good in terms of its balance sheet so when it goes to IPO everything looks to investors.

Or they might have whatever indicators, real or imagined, saying that they should be shedding costs as much as possible.

I've even seen once spinning off a new company as a way to avoid the word "layoff" or "firing" for cultural reasons. Every few years the company would spin out a new one, moving all the parts they wanted to keep, then liquidate the old.