Posted on 11/16/2009 6:11:30 PM PST by llevrok
She mention the comment that I was referring to.
I was directing my comment to the chit that made that statement not our poster.
I understood the comment to be that the “older” work force should all quit so that the Gen Xers can have their jobs.
If I misunderstood...sorry.
Excellent points.
We didn’t push Obama over. It was the boomers and their commie loving ways and vague promises of ‘change’ and finally dealing with all their white guilt all these years by voting for a clean articulate (as VP Joe said) black guy who likes Saul Alinsky and his ghostwriter terrorist friend Bill Ayers.
EXACTLY...
Dude you are not going to have it both ways. You can’t call Gen X’ers worthless then get mad when I said the Army of the 1970’s was a joke. Most members of the military at that time know it had become a joke. Drug use was widespread, discipline was crap, hell I seen 70’s military with sideburns and fairly long hair. Desertions and crime was common.
Yes there was plenty of good Baby Boomer leaders who shaped up the raw material but the raw material of the 70’s was the drug using f*ck authority generation while that of the 80’s was much more respectful of authority and could be molded into a quality fighting force.
What the hell is up with you Hippies anyway? I see veterans events and the old World War II and Korean War vets are usually a bunch of clean cut types and the Gulf War and Desert Storm vets usually clean shaven. Too many of the Vietnam Vets look like hobo’s wearing old ripped army fatigues. Show some respect for the uniform and yourselves.
The boomers aren’t the first generation to fight in the jungles. The people spitting on them was other boomers not mine. Heck when did America start showing respect to the Vietnam Vets? When my generation came of age. But judging from people like yourself maybe we was naive.
By the way Gramps in terms of clueless if you was really in the I.T. field did you noticed that most employers and software businesses prefer to hire young workers vs those old Baby Boomers you think is so much better. I am sure you can share war stories of how much tougher it was to program a reel to reel mainframe using COBOL vs. some of these newfangled PC’s.
Just like the persons who ran the US Military during WWII was the Lost Generation (the generation that came of age and fought in World War I then came home to start a family when the Great Depression hit and then they was the senior leaders of WWII).
I don’t think the Lost Generation got the credit they deserve and the Greatest Generation gets too much credit. But as raw material for the military they did everything expected of them.
Same with Gen X, there was a core of very good boomers who didn’t buy into all the crap that was sold that generation in terms of counterculture who did rebuild the military. But compare the average recruit of 1975 to 1985 and there was a world of difference in terms of quality.
>>Dude you are not going to have it both ways. You can’t call Gen X’ers worthless then get mad when I said the Army of the 1970’s was a joke. Most members of the military at that time know it had become a joke. Drug use was widespread, discipline was crap, hell I seen 70’s military with sideburns and fairly long hair. Desertions and crime was common.<<
I stand corrected — today’s army — mostly Gen Y BTW but run by Boomers — is the greatest fighting force the world hs ever seen. Once a man or woman puts on the uniform they case to be a Gen-anything. They are a soldier and deserve nothing but the highest praise.
>>Yes there was plenty of good Baby Boomer leaders who shaped up the raw material but the raw material of the 70’s was the drug using f*ck authority generation while that of the 80’s was much more respectful of authority and could be molded into a quality fighting force.<<
You seem to be confused on your timelines. Right now the armed forces are run by Boomers.
>>What the hell is up with you Hippies anyway? I see veterans events and the old World War II and Korean War vets are usually a bunch of clean cut types and the Gulf War and Desert Storm vets usually clean shaven. Too many of the Vietnam Vets look like hobo’s wearing old ripped army fatigues. Show some respect for the uniform and yourselves.<<
I have no idea what is up with them. The stupidest looking thin in the world is a bald dude with a gray ponytail. Has nothing to do with any Conservative boomers I know.
>>The boomers aren’t the first generation to fight in the jungles. The people spitting on them was other boomers not mine. Heck when did America start showing respect to the Vietnam Vets? When my generation came of age. But judging from people like yourself maybe we was naive.<<
Whatever.
>>By the way Gramps in terms of clueless if you was really in the I.T. field did you noticed that most employers and software businesses prefer to hire young workers vs those old Baby Boomers you think is so much better. I am sure you can share war stories of how much tougher it was to program a reel to reel mainframe using COBOL vs. some of these newfangled PC’s.<<
Well, sonny, you are wrong. I can get a roomful of Chinese or Indian developers for $5 an hour and their code is acceptable. It is all in knowing what to tell them to do (we call that “writing specifications”).
Those of us who know IT keep our toolkit sharp. I was using PCs in business environments when they were S100 Bus systems running CP/M. I then implemented IBM PCs and all the clones through all the OS’, network topologies and protocols, all the while developing and designing ERPs. Trust me, Payroll hasn’t changed much (although the tools to produce it have as has the way it is approached), nor has A=L+SE changed a whit. But to understand the implications takes experience.
I have been in the field for 30 years and I can guarantee we don’t need kids who know how to write C++ — those are a dime a dozen. But I have yet to meet a kid wh understands how a testing cycle is designed and performed, how to manage risk when going live nor how to establish proper production control integrity procedures. Your response tells me you are, at best, just a dumb coder like your contemporaries.
Sounds like my background to a 'T', down to starting out with CP/M, except my background is in marketing systems.
I have been in the field for 30 years and I can guarantee we don’t need kids who know how to write C++ — those are a dime a dozen. But I have yet to meet a kid wh understands how a testing cycle is designed and performed, how to manage risk when going live nor how to establish proper production control integrity procedures. Your response tells me you are, at best, just a dumb coder like your contemporaries.
About 2003, seeing where the global economy was going, I shifted from a primarily technical role to a hybrid role using my workplace-acquired business background, along with QA, systems analysis and operations analysis. Try outsourcing that. Instead, I am the one who works out the difficult details that are over the heads of the outsourced QA staff for both my client and my employer. I tell kids nowadays to get as diverse a background as quickly as possible, learn a business or two, learn how to write clearly and simply, how to test and how to audit a production environment. Writing requirements and developing QA procedures, especially replicatible regression sets, are the Achilles Heel of outsourcing projects - most places just do some QC as an afterthought.
>>I shifted from a primarily technical role to a hybrid role using my workplace-acquired business background, along with QA, systems analysis and operations analysis. Try outsourcing that.<<
No way! QA/QC and Ops analysis is how you make sure that room full of coders really did what them there specifications said to — and within the proper context of the enterprise. I like/need my catcher to have a backstop!
Your move was wise — those are the areas with the greatest demand, except maybe good DBAs — the ones with lots of experience (I outsourced DBAs before and sometimes it works well, but a good DBA that knows the environment is a great thing to have).
I try to mentor youngsters to show them that applications programming is a fungible job — easily replaced. It is the roles that develop the milieu like yours where value is added. The sharp ones catch on — the not so sharp ones are mostly on the pavement (or returned to India).
>>Writing requirements and developing QA procedures, especially replicatible regression sets, are the Achilles Heel of outsourcing projects -<<
You wouldn’t happen to have a set of Higher Ed regression test sets in your back pocket, would ya? Doesn’t even have to be in any particular tool set. ;) (LOL)
Specs are everything.
Pinning down the end users to tell you what they want is key.
So is being able to make it stick that QA should have more than 30 seconds at the end of the final day before delivery to do the testing; and to return the code to the developers, for a real fix (not scotch tape) before release.
But best of all is an environment where you can have realistic data to make sure all the situations the code might run into, get exercised, and still runs -- while giving the correct answers.
Cheers!
>>But best of all is an environment where you can have realistic data to make sure all the situations the code might run into, get exercised, and still runs — while giving the correct answers.<<
The Holy Grail of UAT. If that ever happens in Real Life, we can expect the Apocalypse ;)
Can you see it? “James Cameron presents a bigger destruction movie than ‘2012!’ Sandra Bullock and Keaneu Reeves star in Perfect Test Data!”
He lives around the corner from me. He's a retired HS teechur, and still owns a VW microbus with a peace sticker in the back window (the windows are painted from the inside). It has a newly acquired "Prosecute Bush-Cheney" sticker.
**Right now the armed forces are run by Boomers.**
So is everything else. In my opinion there is right thinking boomers (Vietnam Vets, traditional values, etc) and wrong thinking (The old Hippies, socialists, etc). Perhaps the military got most of the right thinking ones because when I look at the rest of America the Boomers are running this country into the ground.
First of all I really don’t think you even know what a Generation X’er is. I think you assume everyone who is younger than you is Generation X. You haven’t had a Gen X’er right out of college since maybe the early 1990’s. If you complain that people in your field with between ten and twenty years experience can’t do the job then I have to wonder why they are still working.
Some background on your typical Gen X’ers. Most of us remember Jimmy Carter growing up. A lot of us our first vote was for Ronald Reagan. Most of us can remember what we was doing when Reagan was shot or when the Berlin Wall came down. At the time we was more politically conservative than previous generations. I still believe we are, I can think of several Boomers who voted for Obama and many 18 year old kids who thought Obama was a rock star. But I can’t think of any of my friends my age who voted for Obama.
We are not as well educated as you guys. Remember “New Math”? Our Boomer teachers tried out all sorts of experimental teaching techniques they learned in college and most was failures. But compared with what is being thought in the schools currently I hope home schooling saves us. In college we was told of the good old days by Boomer professors of campus protests against the war and brick throwing. I had one professor complain that this current generation (mine) just wasn’t as activist as his (Boomer). Hell most of us just wanted to earn a living to repay college loans rather than change the World.
Most Boomers came from stable two parent families, Most Gen X’ers are children of divorce so cut us some slack that we are more screwed up because of it.
I remember when music wasn’t rap and reality shows didn’t dominate the channels. Can’t blame that on us, I remember Time Warner and the others pretty much forced good music and entertainment off the air and they was ran by Boomers and older. The culture turned coarser around 1992 when the Baby Boomers got into leadership (Bill Clinton).
About all the politicians in Washington is boomers and so is a high percent of the media. Of course there is plenty of idiots of my generation as well who shares the blame.
So I am truly sorry my generation don’t measure up to your high standards. Baby Boomer Barack Obama scares the hell out of me. If you caught Glen Beck today you know why.
Now I might tease you for being an old timer in I.T. (which I am not involved in)but I still respect your work. I am also going to say that I didn’t have anything against young people until a year or two ago when I started to notice the next generation coming into my Guard unit. Too many of them had spent all their lives on medication of some sort (Ritalin, etc) and just seem brainwashed yet narcissistic. There is still good ones who get the military but be afraid because these are your Obama robots.
We share more than we differ, I think. We are clearly both stubborn and will push back when pushed — God knows we need that in Conservatives these days.
We also seem to share the same values and see the world through similar lenses.
I’ll put mine away now and zip up.
Peace Out and God Loves Bobby Sherman, amigo.
:)
>>He lives around the corner from me. He’s a retired HS teechur, and still owns a VW microbus with a peace sticker in the back window (the windows are painted from the inside). It has a newly acquired “Prosecute Bush-Cheney” sticker.<<
OMG!! LOL!!
Let’s make a pact — we won’t ding each other personally on the Crevo threads. I won’t be condescending (you heard it here first) and you won’t be — well, you know.
When we meet outside of those environs we are usually on the same page, sometimes the same staff and measure.
Give it some thought. I will, too. I think I’ve been a sh*t lately, beyond what is necessary to make “my point.” But I still get to joke, just not be a jerk about it.
But since he was on the receiving end of the knowledge passed on by his betters, he thinks himself superior. But he wasn't all that willing to do the same to the succeeding generation, because he viewed himself superior to them. We were supposed to know everything from the womb. And if we didn't? Well, we aren't worth his time.
So we Gen-Xers have looked beyond the Booomers, realizing the self absorbed tools that they are. We looked to our grand-parents. We have more in common with them than our parents. They lived through real adversity. They didn't live through the best of times, like they made sure their children did. Yet they didn't view themselves as the best generation like the Boomers do. They considered themselves lucky.
So yeah, we Gen-Xers are a tad bitter. Our parents think we are failures at everything, no matter what we do. But our parents are too self-centered to realize that we are their progeny; that we are a reflection of them. And somehow their failings are our fault.
Wow, got bitter much, 98C?
Well, if my words provide career and personal advice then my work is done here. If not, no one’s work will ever be enough.
I suggest you change glasses and look at reality and what is needed to succeed. Bad attitudes don’t do well.
You know what is scary Sir is that I vaguely recall sitting in front of the big Zenith color tv set in the 70’s as a kid and hear things on the news such as Weather Underground or Maoist and now 30 years later we hear those terms again as connections to the President.
It is like some unbelievable movie where the monster keeps coming back to life no matter how many times you kill it.
As long as we have such a dangerous common enemy arguing about generational differences is pretty stupid on my part so you are alright in my book as well.
Is this a knuckles bump moment? ;) LOL — we’ll do fine as long as we all stick together.
And the first time I saw a color TV was in my Grandma’s house when I was around 10 or 11 — I had never seen anything so vivid in my life!
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