Talking 'Bout My Generation

[Kyle]

I was talking with another lawyer in my office and we realized that, while we are both Gen-X, we're outnumbered by Millennials three-fold. We have a bunch of young lawyers.

How much do you buy into generational differences? While I tend to think they're horseshit, there is something to the fact that, as we age we think differently from younger people.

[Tahlvin]

You're thinking with the benefit of 50-ish years of experience. When you were that age, you were just as full of horse pucky as those darn youngster are now.

Incidentally, it hit home for me this week with the first verified case of what I knew was eventually going to happen. I started working at my former software company in September 2000, and while I left the company in 2011, I've been doing consulting work on the same application I worked on while I was there. That means I've been working with that software for 24 years this September. The company is known for hiring a lot of young college graduates, working them hard for a few years, when they burn out, leave and get replaced with a new college graduate again. Therefore, I've known for a couple years now that there are probably people working at the company on that same software that were not yet born when I began working with that software. And this week, I met one of those people face-to-face for the first time. I think it freaked him out more than it did me, thinking about the fact that I have worked with that software longer than he's been alive and probably know it much better than he ever will.

[Mike]

I wouldn't say all of the generational stuff is bullshit. I think there are cultural differences between generations due to people of similar ages having similar experiences. The Greatest Generation, for example, all lived through the Great Depression and they were all of prime fightin' age when WWII rolled around. For Boomers, much of their formative years were spent under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation from the evil Russkies. These were kids who had school nuke-attack drills on the reg, where everyone got to hide under their desks while knowing it would do no good. Members of Gen Z have never known a life without smart phones. Computers are my business, and it's amazing to me how incredibly tech proficient they are while lacking some very basic understanding of how/why the magic boxes do things.

These are just a handful of examples of the thousands of things that are unique to one generation's experience that no other generation can really know. So I think you can talk reasonably about generational culture and trends, but anyone trying to tell you that Millennials are all ______ is blowing smoke.

My oldest son is a Millennial working in tech, and I have two Millennial coworkers who are just barely older than him. But my son is the oldest of four raised by parents who are now mid-fifties. Both of my coworkers are only children whose parent are in their mid-to-late seventies... as old as my own parents. So these three have all kinds of differences and similarities, only a small portion of which are attributable to the year they were born.