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.
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.
