Ignoring 'Generation Techs' at your own peril | CNET News.com
Didn't spend much time reading news today, as I usually do. This article caught my eye though.
It actually summed up quite nicely the troubles I too have encounted in the workspace, with regards to people not being able to deal with my way of working and communicating. Its always been a bit of a mystery to me why I cant often get the "older" generation interested in things like Instant Messaging, Blogging (though I am relativly new to it myself), Open communications, and sharing of information in effective ways. The following passage really struck home:
"Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don't talk about "information overload"? Rather, they crave more information."
More than once, I have heard people tell me how fed up they are with email, with all the 'new' stuff they have to learn. Its a completely oposite viewpoint to my own. You can probably imagine then, what happens when I try to communicate what I am up to, or try to stimulate duscussion within an IT department.. people tell me to shut the hell up.
More often than not, I am the only person in the IT department that it like this, and as often, it leads me to get fed-up with that customer within a relativly short period of time. I have sometimes wondered weather something was wrong with me, weather I needed to change, in order to fit in better. Certainly if I where to believe my companies own account managers, I should. Because of this attitude of mine, I am notoriously hard to place at a customers.
But one IT manager once told me that, even though people in his department where basicly fed up with the "noise" I was producing, I should never stop doing it, because he had valued it more than he let on. Now I had been there six months, and never once had any reason to respect this person, as he is, to many techies' minds I am sure, the wordt kind of manager. However his words to me that day I left bolstered my confidence, and so do articles like this.
It convices me that I must not change.. absolutly not. Its the industries and the companies that must adapt, and will adapt, as ever increasingly, companies seem to be drowing in this new information age, and will have to learn to deal with it - and people like me, in order to survive. And damn anyone that tries to convice me otherwise.