>>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.
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.