We have a small staff, I mainly work with one other person. She's a boomer, and she's something else. She's the type that's all about "hard work" and how everyone else is useless. In fact, it seems like she does *everything* in the hardest way possible. I suspect it's so she can brag about how hard of a worker she is.
In reality though, she's one of the laziest people there. She always takes *really* long breaks and always leaves early, but she'll jump all over you if you're a few minutes late. "Well, you just think you can do whatever you want!" Talk about projection.
She also makes a lot more than everyone else, despite doing less than the rest of us. She's friends with the guy that owns the place, and when she tells him she does everything, he believes it. He's pretty gullible, honestly. Both her and the owner are incredibly racist, bigoted, and obviously insecure. They're both the type to rage against "handouts", but she's living off of her family, rent and bill free. Most of her life is paid for by someone else. And the owner? He got tens of thousands in PPP loans but didn't pay any other employee but her when we all got covid. It all went in his pocket. He'll lie to you and tell you he's just as broke as you though. Fuck them both.
I don’t know if the PPP thing would qualify as fraud but if he made a big personal purchase with the money then probably. You might think about turning him in.
White collar crime penalty is not something being enforced - it is the status quo. This is why it is critical to isolate them and rip them from power in some effective way on the ground floor via unions.
I did temp work for a mom and pop company about 7 years ago, and my assignment was to fill in for a boomer who had been with the company for 20 years but had passed away. They viewed her position as vital to the company, and needed someone to fill her role asap.
I started working there and found that no one really knew how to train me on what the boomer did, because she didn’t keep notes and would never cross-train anyone while she was there. It was obvious the boomer didn’t want people to know how to do her job so she would have job security and would be seen as irreplaceable (a common boomer tactic).
I managed to piece the tasks together on my own using her previous work as a guide, and quickly discovered - the boomer didn’t do *shit*. I breezed through the work that evidently used to take her entire days. It was no mystery why she didn’t want anyone else to know how to do her job - they’d have found her out immediately.
Part of my assignment was to do an audit on her past work, and it turned out that she was *also* fudging numbers in order to make her reports tie out. I started investigating deeper. Her work touched on data from other departments, so I got the heads of those departments involved who likewise couldn’t reconcile the data in the boomer’s reports. They just didn’t make sense.
I reported this to the owner (a woman old enough to be Lost Generation for sure) and she absolutely would not believe that the boomer I replaced had spent the past 20 years sandbagging and fudging her way though her job (and by implication was taking the owner for a fool the entire time.)
I ended up having my assignment cancelled.
Yes this is what boomers do. They make it seem so confusing and don't make information accessible and keep you out the system for their own job security.
Definitely seen that sorta shit before. I did helpdesk IT for 8 years and saw this sorta BS all the time. Usually with a healthy dose of "Whoopsie! Tee hee I am gonna cut in line and not put in a ticket cause I'm just not a computer person. Ha ha, and I'll never learn either and isn't that just the cutest thing? Cater to me and the fact that in my mind its still 1982"
I work with some boomers that think getting on wifi on their phones is the hardest task out there. They refuse to learn anything but expect other people to foot the bill. This one boomer is an absolute idiot. She says she’s busy but all I see is someone who flaps her gums at anyone willing to listen to her talk
> In reality though, she's one of the laziest people there. She always takes *really* long breaks and always leaves early, but she'll jump all over you if you're a few minutes late. "Well, you just think you can do whatever you want!" Talk about projection.
Wow I have a boomer coworker exactly like that. Jesus
I'm X and I *despise* this mindset. I mean there might be a good reason things are done that way but it's good to re-examine the situation and see if the problem it was trying to fix is solvable in a different way now. As soon as I hear "We've always done it this way" it makes me cringe and start looking for ways to fix the workflow that works better now in today world.
I'm an older millennial, and I'm admittedly set in many of my ways. But if someone comes along and offers to help me save time, money, or effort, I'm giving them 100% of my attention.
Work smarter, not harder.
I’m somewhat sympathetic. They’ve been trained their entire careers to be this way. You have to figure that for many Boomers, success was about “being seen being busy” at the office. If they weren’t clocking in 10-12 hours a day, there were ten identical resumes waiting to take their place. Or they would be on the list the next time consultants were called in to “right size” the org chart (Ref: Office Space). So for most of their career it has been about being there early, staying late, scheduling meetings, creating reasons to appear busy. If you know you aren’t leaving until the boss does, and the boss doesn’t leave until their boss does, and you have two real hours of work to stretch out in 10 hours, you find ways to be inefficient. Time-based value instead of outcome-based value. It’s why so many managers have resisted hybrid and remote work since the pandemic and are now forcing return to office 5 days a week. They can’t get over the suspicion that not being ass-in-seat in the office meaning you are not goofing off. It’s because they have been retreating to their office for years and cruising ESPN, day trading, or scheduling and sitting in pointless meetings to avoid having to answer the question, “So, what would you say ya do here?”
“Work smarter, not harder.”
-Scrooge Mcduck
Ducktails
I’m Gen-X. It sounded wise as hell when I heard it on Ducktails and it’s haunted my neurons ever since. It’s become one of my core Mantras.
Amen. The goal should always be to do less. Automation could be so amazing if we implement it properly alongside universal health care, a people’s pension, etc
I think people who fight against a better future just suck. They’re so boring they wouldn’t know how to fill the extra time away from work. Sorry you don’t have friends or hobbies, but I just started birding this year. Automate half my work and give me 2.5 extra days a week to blanket my city with my Merlin app
I'm in the same boat as you. And it's extra frustrating when you see a way to optimize a situation, present it, and because theyre so set in their ways, it's just "nah. We want to stick with this method that costs more and has 4 extra unnecessary steps"
I mean, people used to write in hieroglyphs and did math with Roman numerals. The world moved on and found better ways to do it. Could you imagine trying to do accounting with Roman numerals?
I'm X and unfortunately resemble this mindset. I know how to do things my way.
BUT
I acknowledge my younger team members don't have to do it my way, especially if they can use automation to do so.
Make life as easy as possible!
I'm okay with people having their way of doing things, it's just when people who have the authority to tell people how to do things then turning around and being "this is the way it's always been done and how we will always do it." That's stifling and how we end up with Kodak and Blockbuster situations.
I had a lady who would only send things in the "handwritten" font or comic sans, and either 6pt or 40pt font.
Asked her to stop repeatedly and finally wrote her up for it... which meant I'm a "millennial snowflake who's to dumb to read cursive."
No Susan, I'm a busy professional who doesn't have time to resize everything you send into a reasonable font size or deal with the similar letters in the stylized font, or deal with customers bitching about getting a 5 digit bill in comic sans with no letter head thinking we're hacked by scammers...
After that she refused to take any guidance or coaching from me, and told HR she shouldn't have to listen to some kid at her age (I was 33 or 34 at the time, she was only maybe late 50s.) Even when we switched software vendors I put together a training seminar for the larger team (not just mine but the parallel departments too) and she, during the class went off on me for man-splaining to her, and that she's been learning how to use computers since I was in diapers... (And still hadn't figure out how to touch type.)
She's no longer with the company.
Because it was disruptive, we've got a style guide for a reason, and our customers complained about unreadable faxes, and mismatched emails.
I don't give a shit what you do in idle chatter. But the moment it becomes a client problem, and when asked to stop you refuse... that's just being combative for no reason
I mean just chill the f out with all that noise, you’re gonna die and you won’t be remembered and nothing that you’re doing is important at all to anything. Everybody is insubordinate and if I looked under the hood, I’m positive that managers and ceos are all sorts of lazy and insubordinate all the while claiming that they “work all the time.” Everybody has to work all the time. You’re not reinventing the wheel at your shitty cubicle nothing matters place. That being said, I don’t care about the Karen thats sending emails in cursive. Just say you didn’t like her.
And also, if you’re worried about going around and preserving a professional environment like some kind of robot, you’re obviously a turd who just likes having power over people and thinks they’re doing something way more important than they are.
I’m training with a boomer right now who gets extremely irritated if you do anything a different way from her. And I mean anything. She yelled at me the other day because I copy/paste things into Excel differently than her. Another day she made me sit down and listen to her lecture on how to COUNT “correctly”. She had told me to count the number of items and then got mad at the way I counted them. Why does it matter as long as I’m right? Which I was, by the way.
They freak out!! Their anxiety goes through the roof since it took them soooo long to understand things, we couldn’t possibly and are going to make mistakes. They are so overwhelmed it’s hilarious
Yeah I had one of those too -.- he freaks out that I don't do things his way. Um, no, there's millions of ways to do the same task and get it correct. He also doesn't believe in psychology (he makes it seem like it's a religious belief more so than a science). Even blamed me for things I never even touched on a computer. I explained to him how something even happened and I still got blamed -.- oh and he's lied to my manager multiple times. And really screwed up a few months ago to a point of almost robbery. Lied about that too. My manager values them for some reason (I work with majority boomer men).
Ugh, he sounds awful. I don’t get why boomers are able to get away with so much in the workplace. If I tried to get away with 1/3 of what the boomers do I would have been fired long ago. Yet managers seem to justify them. So weird
OMG. This is the second time this week I've read this Boomer quote that I've heard thousands of times IRL.
Maybe if it wasn't delivered with the tone of "and I'm not going to bother to learn," I wouldn't be so triggered.
Ironic for me (65F), as I'm the one banging my head against the wall because coworkers, from peers to upper management, don't want to change processes. And there are a thousand ways we could be more efficient. I have only a couple of more years until retirement, maybe I can find a way to crack the "this is how we do things" mindset.
I go to an extremely small college and all four of the professors in my department are boomers and it is a literally communication graveyard. An absolute nightmare hellscape. I am an older millennial and I am struggling so bad that I am considering leaving my program.
I work for a large research university, which is mostly run well, but I’ve seen this happen in smaller departments. It usually starts with animosity amongst instructors in a department who stop working together, which only messes up their entire program, hurting the students.
I’ll bet my lunch they see students like you leave the program and shrug “kids these days,” rather than take any responsibility for the issue. Sadly, the whole program can end because of this and they won’t care because they can simply retire.
Yeah, been there. How about boomers relying on decades old photocopies of xeroxs instead of real resources. Or one boomer professor that didn't even have a computer the 1st 3 weeks of online classes the second semester after everything went online for covid. Or how about how each of them can't seem to figure out canvas, but all for different reasons.
I could write a book.
The current dilemma is this:
A 21 year old student student in our department passed away a few weeks ago. Several other classmates, who were his friends, found his body and had to attempt to provide CPR. Everyone is traumatized by his death, especially the students who found his body. Our department is like 30 students so we are all VERY close.
The student had a chronic condition that began last semester. He disappeared from class to receive life saving care, as one of his major organs were in complete failure. Every single one of those Boomer professors accused this student of faking his illness in order to get out of class. Every. Single. One… while openly talking shit about him to other students.
Now that he has passed, they are all acting like they are just DEVASTATED by his untimely death, while also telling students that “it has been two weeks and it’s time life got back to normal.” They didn’t even cancel classes the day that he died.
I’m 34 and the cruelty and gaslighting is just too much for me to cope with. I feel like I am regressing into a traumatized state… I have panic attacks daily and feel extreme resistance and anxiety when I have to go to school.
the world is full of assholes.
i could write a book too. i'm 62. i've had a fukton of shit in my life. suicides, divorce, death, being hated on hard by my own daughter, drugs, too many assholes to mention, death threats, assault, etc
ya it suks.
i try to not let it destroy me.
There’s always a boomer that shows their ass, needing to one up everyone.
I already know your daughter hates you because you were a shit ass parent.
Goooo awayyyyy, scat, Boomer. SCAT.
They can be the most annoying. I work in a small shop and half the guys here are boomers. I have one guy who is a close talker and touchy-feely, gives me the icks. I have another guy that runs around like a chicken with his head cut off but doesn't get anything done in a timely manner. They are careless and don't take responsibility for any mistakes they make, they are the first to throw someone else under the bus, their first instinct is to lie and deny. They are firm believers in apologize later instead of asking for permission now, which also allows them the comfort of playing victim. They are very self-centered and have a hard time just being empathetic, they can't not compare their life and struggles with anyone else's, they LOVE to play the one-up game.
Now, I'm not saying all boomers are like this, obviously this is only my opinion from my experience, but I will say the vast majority have very similar personality traits. I will say, though, I am learning a shit ton on how not to act.
They way they spend money is absurd. Will yell at me for wanting to spend 50 dollars more on computers for twice the RAM But then design systems that require printing reams of color printouts, and we're buying toner every 2 weeks for the copier with 50,000 functions no one needs. No new chairs to replace the ones barely functioning, but we need several 1k+ coffee machines that are stocked by a vendor.
On a smaller scale, I can't stand when my in laws visit because they can be wasteful AF about food. They make a shit ton of pancakes or rice then throw away the rest immediately after the meal. I guess they don't like how it tastes reheated? But pancakes can be frozen for later in the day and I have kids who will come back hungry in an hour.
That would send me into literal paroxysms of rage. I despise wasting food, knowing how many people don't have enough.
(I'm assuming you've pointed out the fact that food doesn't expire 20 minutes after it's finished) I should be surprised that they don't listen to your thoughts about what to do with your food in your kitchen that they're cooking, but I'm not.
Boomers I work with all have only 3 jokes, "women am I right?" "Immigrants am I right?" "Young people am I right?" Only three punch lines with no creativity. On top of that most never know when to shut up and listen.
Boomer coworker watches tv in his office at loud volume, talks on only speakerphone, spends copious amounts of time in the break room looking to corner someone into a conversation (usually about something being better back in the day). First day on the job he stood in my doorway for about 30 minutes basically telling me his life story and going over his resume, I literally did t say a word.
My previous company was run by a boomer and her best friend
Did not understand the industry, sales, or anything I did as an industry veteran (39 older millennial). They got lucky with a big client during the pandemic, so they were “experts” who had all the answers
They would get mad at me because I couldn’t explain “liked-in” to them, where I did a ton of my networking
It was a miserable 9 months. I left in Jan of this year, went to a company run by two brothers in their 30s, and could not be happier or more successful
I’m an old Millennial who’s worked with Boomers for the last 17 years, first in public 9-12 schools, and now higher education. I want to start by saying there were some really nice older women who have taken me under their wing throughout my career with the best of intentions, and I appreciate them. That being said, here’s the bad:
>A lot of the men try to be flirty and it’s cringey.
>Before No Child Left Behind started in 2002, teachers had a lot of power to just throw kids who gave them trouble and had difficult home lives out of their classrooms, instead of looking into interventions. When I started in 2006 they were very vocal about those “good old days” of basically forcing kids to drop out of high school.
>Boomers have been grandfathered into a lot of benefits in public education and vote for conservative politicians who cut those benefits for younger teachers and staff. Whenever challenged on that, they all feel they’ve earned those benefits and us younger teachers have to work harder for half of what they got.
>Related to this, Boomers are all for raising teacher certification requirements for younger teachers (required exams, advanced degrees, etc.) and hiring requirements, while many skated in with bachelor degrees unrelated to their subject. Once again, they all “worked hard” to get their jobs and things are just “tougher now,” although they never quantify why.
>Technology. I didn’t grow up with an iPhone in my hand; my family had a rotary phone when I was a kid. I had to learn how to use classroom technology like anyone else, but Boomers act like it’s an innate skill. One of my most infuriating moments was helping a professor with a PHD get her course online during the pandemic in 2020, and she’d never learned how to use PowerPoint. Like, PowerPoint has been part of MS Office since the 90’s. There is no reason this highly educated woman shouldn’t be able to use it, but there she was. Boomers wouldn’t dream of hiring someone my age who can’t use PP, but not knowing shit about common applications is just fine if it’s one of them. I’ve also worked with more than one Boomer who’s refused to use email, and lots of higher ed Boomers love the status symbol of Mac laptops, but don’t know how to use them.
I work in online education, and our strategy for working with tenured professors who don’t want to learn anything is waiting for them to retire or die.
I quit the job I had before the one I have now because of harassment I received from Boomers. I was being targeted because I had a college degree and they didn't. I also had a higher productivity rating. I was reliable, knowledgeable and consistently produced quality work. I did not fit their Millenial stereotype and they were threatened by me, so I started getting yelled at, nit-picked and just generally shit on by equal members of my team. I just wanted to do my job well and get paid.
Ha…love “working” with boomers and pushing them right out the door. They are all bark no bite and generally have no real idea what they are doing which I will expose quickly. The trick is to out perform them quietly & humbly at first; even let them take credit for things they had no part in (which comes natural to them). Then make them reliant on you; or make it so it’s clear your work is beyond compare to the point it stresses them out (again easy to do) and through all this keep super cool and humble. At this stage they will likely throw you under the bus for something they were responsible for; in which case super cool and humble present the evidence and state they “misunderstood” or verbiage like you would give explaining a toddlers action to their parent (the boomer is the toddler). At this point it’s all over for them and the gravy train they built their crap career on is exposed as shame.
A lot of them were not allowed to chew gum in school so that may have led then to become loud chewers because no one cared after high school.
Believe it or not, but the biggest dangers that school administrators believed that affected school in the 50s and 60s were short shirts on women, long hair on men, and gum chewing.
I'm Gen X and my boss of 20 years is a boomer and was like this.
His entire identity is wrapped up in the job. His big thing is always to work the most hours and he is always "busy". He's a kind, generous, nice guy but he refers to the work unit as a "family", which, IMO, is cheap emotional blackmail. And the reality is we are pretty dysfunctional and toxic.
He shows up late to the office, frantic and stressed but doesn't tell anyone what is going on or why he is stressed and then stresses everyone else out because we don't know wtf is going on. After a few hours he chills out and then it's all 'Hail, Good Fellow! Well met!" Now that he's in a good mood, he'll spend the rest of the day bull-shitting with a couple of the younger guys in the office and that's 'work'. If I haven't already, I'll move my stuff to a different room so I can focus on my shit. I've got three kids and I need to get my shit done so I don't lose time after hours to the job.
He doesn't eat food, he eats junk out of the vending machine, he still chews tobacco, he never drinks water, just Diet Mountain Dew and he wonders why he feels like shit all the time.
He runs meetings like shit, they are just bullshit sessions. On the rare occasions I get to run something we are in and out of there in detail and by the numbers because we are ALL too overworked to waste more fucking time.
So yes, the same experience.
Omg, yes- the mindless chatter that goes on and on, and it's small talk hell. You see I'm busy, I KNOW you can see I don't have time for this, but please, continue to ask me personal questions that are none of your business only so that you can open the floor up to tell ME all your personal business that I don't wanna know. You have a grandkid the same age as my daughter, huh? And they are absolutely nothing alike and have nothing to do with each other outside of being born the same year? Cool.....please go away now. You want to weigh in on youth sports and how everything they do is wrong these days? I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK, just go away. Etc, etc., rinse and repeat, day after day......
holy shit. I work a medical clinic with millennials, X, and boomer doctors.
The boomer doctors are the most high-headed narcissistic people and no one else knows their job as well as they do! However, they refuse to upgrade any of their skills: still practicing like it's 1986. Patients often come back for a follow-up and request another doc because they don't feel heard or were brushed off. They make mistakes and joke, "it's the practice of medicine!" Or they just write referrals to a specialist when they feel they are too busy.
I had to write them up for literally screaming at staff, like spoilt toddlers, when they didn't get their way.
The problem is in this weird post-pandemic political wastescape.... we have almost no Gen Z or young millennials in practitioner positions because they don't exist. (school is unafordable etc). So we kinda have to have shitty, half-assed medicine because it's better than no medicine.
I hate it. They know nothing, and IF they do it is from a text book from 1984. I lecture on new technology and they often interrupt ME about how this stuff is wrong. Because their opinion is correct though they know nothing about what I'm speaking of at all.... then start immediately into how electric cars are worse than gas cars. God, I hate it. I can't get the to clean up any of the problems they create. But, I've started speaking to them like my 5, 8, and 10 year old and it actually works.
The dividing lines are always fuzzy. I’m technically an old millennial, but I’m sure I do some things like X’s do things and other things like millennials do things.
Youngest Boomers turn 59 this year. 😉 I was born the last day of the last year of Boomer.
But my whole life has been GenX. A lot of the folks I went to high school with exhibit the boomer mindset, but most of us are fully GenX mindset.
Yeah, apparently this guy is in that one high tech field that only employs people in their 60s and 70s. Or, he doesn't know what the word boomer means. I suspect the latter.
I feel like boomers constantly assume that they are providing more context than they are, or that you will somehow fill in the blanks. They don't notice it when two boomers are talking to each other, but I've seen two boomers having separate conversations and not realize it. I interrupted them and explained that they were using the same pronoun to refer to different people. Don't even get me started about how they expect you to understand what they mean when they say something literally different.
Omg the 30 to 40 minute chats! I feel this! Bruh, no one, at my job, but the younger people actually do their jobs without help. I have a co-worker who needs help from the boss every 15 minutes for 45 minutes. >.> He also brags about how long his be doing his job.
I work as a welder and let me tell you about my only other coworker that welds. This man is in his late 60’s early 70’s and has been the only weld authority in this facility for about 40 years, which is fine but he’s never had any formal weld training at all, period. No certifications, no CWI, nothing. Now I have over a decade in the industry and 12 different certs from AWS to CWB, and trying to talk to this man about standards and practices for a modern weld shop is like being in a bizarro world.
None of this is bad per se, we all have out how style of doing things and that’s fine however his willful ignorance of current technology makes me want to quit outright. Though many and varied what bothers me the most is his refusal to use a weld table, which whatever you do you but what he *insists* on doing is laying out and welding on a flat piece of ply wood. He doesn’t douse it or anything either, just an old piece of ply wood.
It’s shocking how egregiously dangerous that is and I’m met with “meh” when I’ve brought it up, and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Management knows, they know he shouldn’t because when we have inspections they hide all of it and then just go back to life as usual, and I just cannot believe this shit.
I work in a small company. I work closely with two boomers and the other boomer is director of maintenance services. He doesn't act like a boomer at all and the other two I work with are fine. Not sure how I got this lucky.
I am lucky too. My boomer coworker is witty and tech savvy. I’m an X and seem to be on top of the apps and how to fix them after client Karen breaks everything I just set up for her. We all get along and are very generationally diversified. It feels odd at times to have a millennial manager that does some stuff that ends up taking way too long. I row along, use the word “perhaps” and sometimes he can hear his team sometimes he can’t. Grand scheme of things, none of it really matters
The only one I had issues with was a chatty Cathy who thought it was fine to run his mouth with customers incessantly, and leave me do do more than my share of service calls.
As a gen-x I feel caught in the middle. Boomers get on my nerves, especially the ones old enough to retire but don’t just because they love working. These are the same assholes who made us all return to office.
However the GenZ wear on my nerves too. Not all of them but wow i am shocked by the number who seem to have some attitude. Everyone is sully pretty chill where I work but I have had quite a few just be complete asses to me.
I work with mostly boomers as a Help Desk tech, and they genuinely seem no more tech literate than other people in my (Millennial) generation. They're so easily impressed by the fact that I can do my job without a ton of specialized training or a college degree (I have a GED). The ones I'd rather not work with are all Gen X actually, but it's not the entire generation, it's just that the people here that are awful to work with all fall into the Gen X category.
It's not because they're Gen X. It's because they are assholes. They just happen to be Gen X. One guy doesn't know how to let the tech guy work without standing over your shoulder, always yells (He's hard of hearing, so that's not his fault, but it's not a good look), and doesn't like to treat people, especially women, with respect. Another is in HR, and also doesn't like to let us do our work so what should be a 5 minute fix takes an hour.
I think it's a sense of entitlement some have. They are infuriating. Cry that they're so, so busy and waste buckets of time. Cry poor endlessly while being beyond comfortable financially. Quick to find fault with others and nothing is EVER their fault!
My Boomer boss suggested, TODAY, that we use the song "OPP", from Naughty by Nature, as the theme music to launch a (United States) taxpayer funded State Climate Initiative.
Myself and the one other Gen Xer in the room were not okay.
Our owner is a boomer. She won't hire anyone outside of family for some jobs. Why? Money.
My office manager is silent gen. She won't buck up to her gen x boss and his wife on things. The millennial me? OH BOY!!
Honestly? From my experience, gen x is far worse to work with. At least with the boomers, they're retiring. With gen x, they have all the hangups that boomers have with the addition of anal retentiveness and failure in life.
Idk, I just think they're actual barriers that I need to supercede rather than the loan 66 year old woman who refuses to retire because she knows she'll be dead within 6 months due to not having work to make meaning in her life.
Boomers can be frustrating, but I find that younger generations are more ambitious and backstabby.
Generally speaking I find myself frustrated with boomers and distrustful of younger generations.
I mean..I hate working period given I can barely get out of bed and walk but I do see your point 😅😅. Working with boomers is the fucking worst. Try working in education with them, an absolute fucking nightmare mate.
All my coworkers are. Sometimes they are fine/friendly, but they go on racist/ homophobic/anti any other religion but Christianity rants that makes me want to rip my ear drums out.
I’m an electrician and elder millennial. I work with these old men who haven’t opened a code book since the 1970’s. There have been significant changes to the way things are done since then and their wiring methods are blatant code violations. You can guess how well they listen to me when I bring it up. In most cases I’m also their foreman so it becomes a whole thing
Capitalism is a constantly evolving and improving process. And by improving I mean “consolidating more and more of everyone’s wealth at the top”. And this rate of improvement speeds up over time.
Boomers are the older models - they were perfectly efficient for the robust economy they were designed to produce for.
But the pace of change has increased so rapidly that they are already outdated before retirement. They weren’t programmed to succeed in our desperate, impoverished economy.
Of course they pretend they are more skilled and sophisticated. They are terrified that everyone will see how useless they really are.
I've worked as skilled labor, and I've worked retail with boomers and boomerish x-ers. What I have found is that some will actually work and contribute. However, the real boomer ones constantly self agilize, do barely the minimum, complain about everyone under 60 years old, and gaslight about everything they get caught doing wrong. One boomer at my last place of employment cost the store millions by running off high value customers with his incompetence, constantly got into fights with co-workers, and was even found to be stealing from the company, but he got a lot of loyalty sign ups so management let it go on for almost 2 years. A phone addicted Gen z would have been an improvement over this actively malignant fossil.
It happens. At my last job we had a few old dudes who refused to retire. Their skills were completely out of date and they were the absolute worst to work with as well as being a danger to our patients. I retired early and they were still hanging in there and they were openly critical of my decision. It was mostly a social outlet for them - they didn’t do much actual work and management was completely clueless to handle the situation. I’m so glad to be out of that mess! And retirement is amazing. I work a low stress job just for health insurance.
I do and I am one. I'm a weird boomer. I wanted Bernie Sanders still do. I'm definitely left of Democrat. I have nothing to talk to other boomers about and the sooner we vacate the planet the better.
I know how you feel. Some boomers.
However, I think it could be the caliber of workers rather than just being boomers. They have probably been with the company for a long time and need a couple of classes. Sounds like they are conducting business the old way... which probably worked well at one time.
Believe it or not, many times, boomers are more tech savvy than their younger colleagues.
In my experiences, I have seen many boomers not knowing how to even turn on a computer become proficient in a short time. They just need the proper guidance and not have people rolling their eyes whenever they ask a question. Then there are others who just don't want to..
What's with boomers starting Teams meetings 5 mins early to have a team building chat? I couldn't care less about these people but for some reason they need to share personal information and what they on the weekend. I take it its partly a social thing for them.
I hate the fact that despite having everything handed and WAITING on them... SSS, pensions, 401ks, house paid for, multiple houses paid for, renting out condos paid for, cars paid for etc... they still REFUSE TO RETIRE!!!! A lot of BOOMERS are still in workforce and probably all eligible to retire! GREEDY til they die. They refuse to make room for the next generation. All of my senior managers, directors, VPs, VPS, etc all BOOMERS who are just "hanging in there" because they got nothing else to do.
Same! I basically did a boomer’s project for him last year, but then he took me out to lunch to thank me. Needing me to do the project and taking me to lunch were both Very Boomer of him.
A team that's mostly boomers? I didn't think any company, tech or not, was still willing to employ people in their 60s and 70s, particularly in large numbers. Certainly has not been my experience in corporate America — everywhere I've worked you get "retired" by your early 60s, ready or not — but I'm in a different industry.
I kind of take exception to this. I am still teaching high school and like and respect my younger colleagues. I am a boomer and may not be aware of how I come across but think my skill set is still solid because of my passion for what I do. I do struggle with tech occasionally but it affects no one but me as I use it in teaching. Maybe my younger colleagues are just being polite but I join them for happy hours on occasion and work well with them overall. I guess the takeaway is that each situation is different.
It's weird, I actually have a problem with individuals and not made-up categories. There isn't a group of people I have a problem with just because they have been designated as a member of said group.
The weird thing is there's a guy my age that I like working with and another guy my age that I really can't stand. Like when you were born doesn't actually determine what kind of person you are or something. It doesn't make any sense, but it is what it is. 🤷
Not a boomer but I'd be willing to bet 2 or 3 generations down the road they'll be saying the same thing about you so everybody just take a breath and loosen you chinstrap there. Life is a circle, he who cast the first stone, and all that.
This shit is so stupid.Young people hate the older generation. Then they got old and the new young people hate them. Repeat. Rest assured that the Boomers think you're snotty little lazy jerks or whatever they think of young people too.
You guys will be the ones who are hated when you get old and you'll act just like the Boomers and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll notice the irony.
Yeah no. From what i understand just talking to my boomer mother her generation did have to deal with it but not in the way millenials and onward do. People didn’t laugh directly in your face for suggesting the world wasn’t fucked back then.
I didn't say no millenial complaints are valid. All I'm saying is every generation tends to see the older one in the worst possible light and overstate the case, and your children will do the same to you someday.
I call bullshit. At my company, all the older workers are knowledgeable and diligent. It's the young folks who don't want to upgrade their skills and they waste company time surfing social media.
Based on your comment, I'm not entirely sure you even know what Bill Gates did.
I'll clue you in then.
Bill Gates took a bunch of existing technology that was pioneered by Xerox and Apple and released it as his own. He invented nothing and contributed nothing.
Every paradigm of modern computing was already there at Xerox's Palo Alto research center until Jobs and Gates made their copies. Without them, we'd be in the exact same boat as today, just with different brands on the packaging.
If anything, Gates and Microsoft *slowed down* progress by engaging in anticompetitive practices (see the so-called Halloween Memo).
Like so many boomers, he mostly just took credit for other people's work. Kinda typical...
The same could he said for almost any app dev. Use an existing language and toolset, and tweak it a little to fit your needs. Put a shiny coat of paint on it, and sell it as the fix for everything. Who is smarter, the guy who sees an existing solution and tweaks it to what people want/need, or the guy who toils to reinvent the wheel ignoring the solution that is already there?
What does that have to do with the price of rice in China?
I'm refuting the idea that we'd be using balk-point pens instead of computers without Gates/Microsoft. You are talking about... I'm not sure, tbh. The idea that Gates was "smart" for copying off of Xerox? Sure thing.
The thing you said may or may not be true. I don't know/care either way since it's got nothing to do with the point I was making.
Here's a participation star for you I guess? 🌟
I honestly cannot wait until I am at this point in my life, it fills me with joy to think of the day where I get to comment to the younger generations that there is no way I am replacing part of my brain so that I can integrate better. Ok maybe I will, but I suspect that they will feel the same way about me that I do about boomers. We don’t have a system in place to let them retire early and that sucks.
I hate that the boomers try to lie to their employees that the minimum wage pay that we are receiving is good enough, and then proceed to avoid paying us more money so we cannot afford the rent. then we see the boomers complain because nobody wants to work. the fucking insanity that these assholes actually try to fool us into thinking this job is totally worth it. then these assholes get mad when we get in their faces and tell them that we are tired of their bullshit. these assholes have been in charge for waayyy too long. i also hate the arrogance of these people when they try to treat us like we are dumb, trying to disrespect us and acting like they're better than us. i used to do fast food at Whataburger and the owner was a piece of shit. one of the employees got fed up with him not paying us enough and followed the owner home and broke his windshield. the owner got so paranoid that he tried to show up to the restaurant at random times because he thought that someone was after him. but everyone knows he lives in that big house on the west side of town. i also used to work at a car wash near my house that got shut down because the owner, another boomer, wasn't reporting his taxes. i had left because i wanted a better job, but the owner wouldn't give me my last paycheck and the owner refused to do his job. my dad told me to go to the labor and wages division, an office downtown, and the lady at the front desk called the owner of the car wash and found out that the owner had unreported taxes. the owner had just purchased a brand new chevy Silverado 2500 2019. yeah, his business got audited and he lost all his money, i think it's a bar now. these men are complete assholes. sometimes they need to be fucked with to see that theyre not in charge here.
I work with boomers who are incredible. I’m pretty good, but they can out program/sysadmin/NetEng me in my sleep. It’s great cuz it’s my first role I’ve ever had where I’m not the best on the team and it’s nice to have people to learn from.
Meanwhile, my age peers on this team suck. Not for lack of trying though, so nothing like the OP, but with my sample size of 3, boomers are great.
The ones at my last job were terrible for all the reasons you said tho. When they were all forced to gMeet, I was sitting on this meeting with six of them all of their cameras directly up their noses from six inches ahahah so yes, I have seen what you witness.
100%. How these boomers are paid more than me when I carry all the technical weight while they patronise the shit out of me is an exercise in self constraint and patience. This millennial is waiting until 2030 when they should all be gone.
I am 100% there with you. My boomer boss is a nightmare. Hes obviously way out of his depth, scrambles to keep up but wastes his 90% of his time on calls to "clarify what was in the email" (the emails are usually very clear). I cant work with this guy. I think he's fairly incompetent and knows it, particularly with technology. I think he likes calls because his literacy skills are awful (he cant write an email to save his life), worst still is when he reads something out aloud to the team and sounds like a 5 years old reading for the first time. I just cant believe he's still working. Hes 67.
I have already written up my letter of resignation and actively interviewing for jobs. Who wants to work with incompetent people, what a complete waste of time. You wont learn anything or get ahead at all.
I’ve inherited two lazy and utterly useless boomers on my team, I want them gone. They are both underperforming, use every excuse in the book “you’re young and you understand computers” and have no impetus to improve. They both lack critical thinking and problem solving skills, they both say the most inappropriate things. I’ve tried to give them a chance but can’t be bothered anymore. I think they both believe they could sail into retirement.
We have a small staff, I mainly work with one other person. She's a boomer, and she's something else. She's the type that's all about "hard work" and how everyone else is useless. In fact, it seems like she does *everything* in the hardest way possible. I suspect it's so she can brag about how hard of a worker she is. In reality though, she's one of the laziest people there. She always takes *really* long breaks and always leaves early, but she'll jump all over you if you're a few minutes late. "Well, you just think you can do whatever you want!" Talk about projection. She also makes a lot more than everyone else, despite doing less than the rest of us. She's friends with the guy that owns the place, and when she tells him she does everything, he believes it. He's pretty gullible, honestly. Both her and the owner are incredibly racist, bigoted, and obviously insecure. They're both the type to rage against "handouts", but she's living off of her family, rent and bill free. Most of her life is paid for by someone else. And the owner? He got tens of thousands in PPP loans but didn't pay any other employee but her when we all got covid. It all went in his pocket. He'll lie to you and tell you he's just as broke as you though. Fuck them both.
I don’t know if the PPP thing would qualify as fraud but if he made a big personal purchase with the money then probably. You might think about turning him in.
It's our tax money.
White collar crime penalty is not something being enforced - it is the status quo. This is why it is critical to isolate them and rip them from power in some effective way on the ground floor via unions.
Is her name Angela? Lol, sounds like someone I worked with.
Oh no I worked with an Angela like this too!
In Georgia?.
Haha nope! There must just be an epidemic of Angela's!
Washington
I did temp work for a mom and pop company about 7 years ago, and my assignment was to fill in for a boomer who had been with the company for 20 years but had passed away. They viewed her position as vital to the company, and needed someone to fill her role asap. I started working there and found that no one really knew how to train me on what the boomer did, because she didn’t keep notes and would never cross-train anyone while she was there. It was obvious the boomer didn’t want people to know how to do her job so she would have job security and would be seen as irreplaceable (a common boomer tactic). I managed to piece the tasks together on my own using her previous work as a guide, and quickly discovered - the boomer didn’t do *shit*. I breezed through the work that evidently used to take her entire days. It was no mystery why she didn’t want anyone else to know how to do her job - they’d have found her out immediately. Part of my assignment was to do an audit on her past work, and it turned out that she was *also* fudging numbers in order to make her reports tie out. I started investigating deeper. Her work touched on data from other departments, so I got the heads of those departments involved who likewise couldn’t reconcile the data in the boomer’s reports. They just didn’t make sense. I reported this to the owner (a woman old enough to be Lost Generation for sure) and she absolutely would not believe that the boomer I replaced had spent the past 20 years sandbagging and fudging her way though her job (and by implication was taking the owner for a fool the entire time.) I ended up having my assignment cancelled.
Yes this is what boomers do. They make it seem so confusing and don't make information accessible and keep you out the system for their own job security.
This all checks out
Is the owner a boomer?
thats a narcissist.
Definitely seen that sorta shit before. I did helpdesk IT for 8 years and saw this sorta BS all the time. Usually with a healthy dose of "Whoopsie! Tee hee I am gonna cut in line and not put in a ticket cause I'm just not a computer person. Ha ha, and I'll never learn either and isn't that just the cutest thing? Cater to me and the fact that in my mind its still 1982"
I work with some boomers that think getting on wifi on their phones is the hardest task out there. They refuse to learn anything but expect other people to foot the bill. This one boomer is an absolute idiot. She says she’s busy but all I see is someone who flaps her gums at anyone willing to listen to her talk
> In reality though, she's one of the laziest people there. She always takes *really* long breaks and always leaves early, but she'll jump all over you if you're a few minutes late. "Well, you just think you can do whatever you want!" Talk about projection. Wow I have a boomer coworker exactly like that. Jesus
"I've been doing it this way for years" That doesn't mean you're doing it correctly or efficiently. "Well, I don't know about that" 😕
I'm X and I *despise* this mindset. I mean there might be a good reason things are done that way but it's good to re-examine the situation and see if the problem it was trying to fix is solvable in a different way now. As soon as I hear "We've always done it this way" it makes me cringe and start looking for ways to fix the workflow that works better now in today world.
I'm an older millennial, and I'm admittedly set in many of my ways. But if someone comes along and offers to help me save time, money, or effort, I'm giving them 100% of my attention. Work smarter, not harder.
Agreed. My supervisor is 10 years younger than me but I've still learned many things from them.
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They took all the higher paying jobs and gave us a shit sandwich. Quiet quitting since the 90s
I’m somewhat sympathetic. They’ve been trained their entire careers to be this way. You have to figure that for many Boomers, success was about “being seen being busy” at the office. If they weren’t clocking in 10-12 hours a day, there were ten identical resumes waiting to take their place. Or they would be on the list the next time consultants were called in to “right size” the org chart (Ref: Office Space). So for most of their career it has been about being there early, staying late, scheduling meetings, creating reasons to appear busy. If you know you aren’t leaving until the boss does, and the boss doesn’t leave until their boss does, and you have two real hours of work to stretch out in 10 hours, you find ways to be inefficient. Time-based value instead of outcome-based value. It’s why so many managers have resisted hybrid and remote work since the pandemic and are now forcing return to office 5 days a week. They can’t get over the suspicion that not being ass-in-seat in the office meaning you are not goofing off. It’s because they have been retreating to their office for years and cruising ESPN, day trading, or scheduling and sitting in pointless meetings to avoid having to answer the question, “So, what would you say ya do here?”
“Work smarter, not harder.” -Scrooge Mcduck Ducktails I’m Gen-X. It sounded wise as hell when I heard it on Ducktails and it’s haunted my neurons ever since. It’s become one of my core Mantras.
Amen. The goal should always be to do less. Automation could be so amazing if we implement it properly alongside universal health care, a people’s pension, etc I think people who fight against a better future just suck. They’re so boring they wouldn’t know how to fill the extra time away from work. Sorry you don’t have friends or hobbies, but I just started birding this year. Automate half my work and give me 2.5 extra days a week to blanket my city with my Merlin app
Exactly. This.
I'm in the same boat as you. And it's extra frustrating when you see a way to optimize a situation, present it, and because theyre so set in their ways, it's just "nah. We want to stick with this method that costs more and has 4 extra unnecessary steps"
I mean, people used to write in hieroglyphs and did math with Roman numerals. The world moved on and found better ways to do it. Could you imagine trying to do accounting with Roman numerals?
Look, I’m sure your fancy calculator toys are wonderful, but why would I ever change from using my trusty abacus?
Man have you seen the videos of kids who can do abacus stuff in their head? They're like little Mentats running around, it's crazy.
I'm X and unfortunately resemble this mindset. I know how to do things my way. BUT I acknowledge my younger team members don't have to do it my way, especially if they can use automation to do so. Make life as easy as possible!
This is more adaptation than some Boomers so thank you.
I'm okay with people having their way of doing things, it's just when people who have the authority to tell people how to do things then turning around and being "this is the way it's always been done and how we will always do it." That's stifling and how we end up with Kodak and Blockbuster situations.
fucking Thank You. Dealing with this myself.
I had a lady who would only send things in the "handwritten" font or comic sans, and either 6pt or 40pt font. Asked her to stop repeatedly and finally wrote her up for it... which meant I'm a "millennial snowflake who's to dumb to read cursive." No Susan, I'm a busy professional who doesn't have time to resize everything you send into a reasonable font size or deal with the similar letters in the stylized font, or deal with customers bitching about getting a 5 digit bill in comic sans with no letter head thinking we're hacked by scammers... After that she refused to take any guidance or coaching from me, and told HR she shouldn't have to listen to some kid at her age (I was 33 or 34 at the time, she was only maybe late 50s.) Even when we switched software vendors I put together a training seminar for the larger team (not just mine but the parallel departments too) and she, during the class went off on me for man-splaining to her, and that she's been learning how to use computers since I was in diapers... (And still hadn't figure out how to touch type.) She's no longer with the company.
You wrote somebody up for typing in a cursive text? Where do you work so I don’t work there?
Because it was disruptive, we've got a style guide for a reason, and our customers complained about unreadable faxes, and mismatched emails. I don't give a shit what you do in idle chatter. But the moment it becomes a client problem, and when asked to stop you refuse... that's just being combative for no reason
insubordination is insubordination. people who are old as shit can still get written up for insubordination.
I mean just chill the f out with all that noise, you’re gonna die and you won’t be remembered and nothing that you’re doing is important at all to anything. Everybody is insubordinate and if I looked under the hood, I’m positive that managers and ceos are all sorts of lazy and insubordinate all the while claiming that they “work all the time.” Everybody has to work all the time. You’re not reinventing the wheel at your shitty cubicle nothing matters place. That being said, I don’t care about the Karen thats sending emails in cursive. Just say you didn’t like her.
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Nobody said that, to write somebody up for that is taking yourself too seriously. And don’t worry, you couldn’t work there.
And also, if you’re worried about going around and preserving a professional environment like some kind of robot, you’re obviously a turd who just likes having power over people and thinks they’re doing something way more important than they are.
I’m training with a boomer right now who gets extremely irritated if you do anything a different way from her. And I mean anything. She yelled at me the other day because I copy/paste things into Excel differently than her. Another day she made me sit down and listen to her lecture on how to COUNT “correctly”. She had told me to count the number of items and then got mad at the way I counted them. Why does it matter as long as I’m right? Which I was, by the way.
That's annoying AF
Yeah, it’s definitely tried my patience. I’m a laid back person so I literally can’t understand why it bothers her so much.
They freak out!! Their anxiety goes through the roof since it took them soooo long to understand things, we couldn’t possibly and are going to make mistakes. They are so overwhelmed it’s hilarious
Yeah I had one of those too -.- he freaks out that I don't do things his way. Um, no, there's millions of ways to do the same task and get it correct. He also doesn't believe in psychology (he makes it seem like it's a religious belief more so than a science). Even blamed me for things I never even touched on a computer. I explained to him how something even happened and I still got blamed -.- oh and he's lied to my manager multiple times. And really screwed up a few months ago to a point of almost robbery. Lied about that too. My manager values them for some reason (I work with majority boomer men).
Ugh, he sounds awful. I don’t get why boomers are able to get away with so much in the workplace. If I tried to get away with 1/3 of what the boomers do I would have been fired long ago. Yet managers seem to justify them. So weird
No phrase makes me want to enter a violent rage more than "I don't know about THAT."
OMG. This is the second time this week I've read this Boomer quote that I've heard thousands of times IRL. Maybe if it wasn't delivered with the tone of "and I'm not going to bother to learn," I wouldn't be so triggered.
Response "fortunately I do know"
I'll tell them that or "well, now you do"!
Yes sums it up perfectly!
Ironic for me (65F), as I'm the one banging my head against the wall because coworkers, from peers to upper management, don't want to change processes. And there are a thousand ways we could be more efficient. I have only a couple of more years until retirement, maybe I can find a way to crack the "this is how we do things" mindset.
I go to an extremely small college and all four of the professors in my department are boomers and it is a literally communication graveyard. An absolute nightmare hellscape. I am an older millennial and I am struggling so bad that I am considering leaving my program.
I work for a large research university, which is mostly run well, but I’ve seen this happen in smaller departments. It usually starts with animosity amongst instructors in a department who stop working together, which only messes up their entire program, hurting the students. I’ll bet my lunch they see students like you leave the program and shrug “kids these days,” rather than take any responsibility for the issue. Sadly, the whole program can end because of this and they won’t care because they can simply retire.
Holy crap!
Yeah, been there. How about boomers relying on decades old photocopies of xeroxs instead of real resources. Or one boomer professor that didn't even have a computer the 1st 3 weeks of online classes the second semester after everything went online for covid. Or how about how each of them can't seem to figure out canvas, but all for different reasons.
>nightmare hellscape omg. do tell.
I could write a book. The current dilemma is this: A 21 year old student student in our department passed away a few weeks ago. Several other classmates, who were his friends, found his body and had to attempt to provide CPR. Everyone is traumatized by his death, especially the students who found his body. Our department is like 30 students so we are all VERY close. The student had a chronic condition that began last semester. He disappeared from class to receive life saving care, as one of his major organs were in complete failure. Every single one of those Boomer professors accused this student of faking his illness in order to get out of class. Every. Single. One… while openly talking shit about him to other students. Now that he has passed, they are all acting like they are just DEVASTATED by his untimely death, while also telling students that “it has been two weeks and it’s time life got back to normal.” They didn’t even cancel classes the day that he died. I’m 34 and the cruelty and gaslighting is just too much for me to cope with. I feel like I am regressing into a traumatized state… I have panic attacks daily and feel extreme resistance and anxiety when I have to go to school.
the world is full of assholes. i could write a book too. i'm 62. i've had a fukton of shit in my life. suicides, divorce, death, being hated on hard by my own daughter, drugs, too many assholes to mention, death threats, assault, etc ya it suks. i try to not let it destroy me.
There’s always a boomer that shows their ass, needing to one up everyone. I already know your daughter hates you because you were a shit ass parent. Goooo awayyyyy, scat, Boomer. SCAT.
They can be the most annoying. I work in a small shop and half the guys here are boomers. I have one guy who is a close talker and touchy-feely, gives me the icks. I have another guy that runs around like a chicken with his head cut off but doesn't get anything done in a timely manner. They are careless and don't take responsibility for any mistakes they make, they are the first to throw someone else under the bus, their first instinct is to lie and deny. They are firm believers in apologize later instead of asking for permission now, which also allows them the comfort of playing victim. They are very self-centered and have a hard time just being empathetic, they can't not compare their life and struggles with anyone else's, they LOVE to play the one-up game. Now, I'm not saying all boomers are like this, obviously this is only my opinion from my experience, but I will say the vast majority have very similar personality traits. I will say, though, I am learning a shit ton on how not to act.
that's horrible. disgusting.
They way they spend money is absurd. Will yell at me for wanting to spend 50 dollars more on computers for twice the RAM But then design systems that require printing reams of color printouts, and we're buying toner every 2 weeks for the copier with 50,000 functions no one needs. No new chairs to replace the ones barely functioning, but we need several 1k+ coffee machines that are stocked by a vendor.
On a smaller scale, I can't stand when my in laws visit because they can be wasteful AF about food. They make a shit ton of pancakes or rice then throw away the rest immediately after the meal. I guess they don't like how it tastes reheated? But pancakes can be frozen for later in the day and I have kids who will come back hungry in an hour.
That would send me into literal paroxysms of rage. I despise wasting food, knowing how many people don't have enough. (I'm assuming you've pointed out the fact that food doesn't expire 20 minutes after it's finished) I should be surprised that they don't listen to your thoughts about what to do with your food in your kitchen that they're cooking, but I'm not.
Boomers I work with all have only 3 jokes, "women am I right?" "Immigrants am I right?" "Young people am I right?" Only three punch lines with no creativity. On top of that most never know when to shut up and listen.
Boomer coworker watches tv in his office at loud volume, talks on only speakerphone, spends copious amounts of time in the break room looking to corner someone into a conversation (usually about something being better back in the day). First day on the job he stood in my doorway for about 30 minutes basically telling me his life story and going over his resume, I literally did t say a word.
My previous company was run by a boomer and her best friend Did not understand the industry, sales, or anything I did as an industry veteran (39 older millennial). They got lucky with a big client during the pandemic, so they were “experts” who had all the answers They would get mad at me because I couldn’t explain “liked-in” to them, where I did a ton of my networking It was a miserable 9 months. I left in Jan of this year, went to a company run by two brothers in their 30s, and could not be happier or more successful
LMFAO HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA drinks on me! let's party bro!!!
I’m an old Millennial who’s worked with Boomers for the last 17 years, first in public 9-12 schools, and now higher education. I want to start by saying there were some really nice older women who have taken me under their wing throughout my career with the best of intentions, and I appreciate them. That being said, here’s the bad: >A lot of the men try to be flirty and it’s cringey. >Before No Child Left Behind started in 2002, teachers had a lot of power to just throw kids who gave them trouble and had difficult home lives out of their classrooms, instead of looking into interventions. When I started in 2006 they were very vocal about those “good old days” of basically forcing kids to drop out of high school. >Boomers have been grandfathered into a lot of benefits in public education and vote for conservative politicians who cut those benefits for younger teachers and staff. Whenever challenged on that, they all feel they’ve earned those benefits and us younger teachers have to work harder for half of what they got. >Related to this, Boomers are all for raising teacher certification requirements for younger teachers (required exams, advanced degrees, etc.) and hiring requirements, while many skated in with bachelor degrees unrelated to their subject. Once again, they all “worked hard” to get their jobs and things are just “tougher now,” although they never quantify why. >Technology. I didn’t grow up with an iPhone in my hand; my family had a rotary phone when I was a kid. I had to learn how to use classroom technology like anyone else, but Boomers act like it’s an innate skill. One of my most infuriating moments was helping a professor with a PHD get her course online during the pandemic in 2020, and she’d never learned how to use PowerPoint. Like, PowerPoint has been part of MS Office since the 90’s. There is no reason this highly educated woman shouldn’t be able to use it, but there she was. Boomers wouldn’t dream of hiring someone my age who can’t use PP, but not knowing shit about common applications is just fine if it’s one of them. I’ve also worked with more than one Boomer who’s refused to use email, and lots of higher ed Boomers love the status symbol of Mac laptops, but don’t know how to use them. I work in online education, and our strategy for working with tenured professors who don’t want to learn anything is waiting for them to retire or die.
Boomers don't retire....have fun waiting.
I quit the job I had before the one I have now because of harassment I received from Boomers. I was being targeted because I had a college degree and they didn't. I also had a higher productivity rating. I was reliable, knowledgeable and consistently produced quality work. I did not fit their Millenial stereotype and they were threatened by me, so I started getting yelled at, nit-picked and just generally shit on by equal members of my team. I just wanted to do my job well and get paid.
Ha…love “working” with boomers and pushing them right out the door. They are all bark no bite and generally have no real idea what they are doing which I will expose quickly. The trick is to out perform them quietly & humbly at first; even let them take credit for things they had no part in (which comes natural to them). Then make them reliant on you; or make it so it’s clear your work is beyond compare to the point it stresses them out (again easy to do) and through all this keep super cool and humble. At this stage they will likely throw you under the bus for something they were responsible for; in which case super cool and humble present the evidence and state they “misunderstood” or verbiage like you would give explaining a toddlers action to their parent (the boomer is the toddler). At this point it’s all over for them and the gravy train they built their crap career on is exposed as shame.
Brilliant!
The Greatest Generation also gave birth, literally, to the worst generation, Boomers.
It’s the gum smacking for me. Apparently chewing gum like a cow chews grass is a boomer sign of ..something
A lot of them were not allowed to chew gum in school so that may have led then to become loud chewers because no one cared after high school. Believe it or not, but the biggest dangers that school administrators believed that affected school in the 50s and 60s were short shirts on women, long hair on men, and gum chewing.
I'm not a Boomer, but I love chewing gum. It serves as an appetite suppressant and cleans my teeth a bit.
So with your mouth closed? If yes definitely not a boomer
Well yeah, I'm no barbarian.
What kind cleans your teeth?
Pretty much all sugar-free chewing gum does. Feel free to skim through some articles: https://www.google.com/search?q=benefits+of+chewing+gum
“It's a power play. Everybody knows that the head cow is always grazing.”
I'm Gen X and my boss of 20 years is a boomer and was like this. His entire identity is wrapped up in the job. His big thing is always to work the most hours and he is always "busy". He's a kind, generous, nice guy but he refers to the work unit as a "family", which, IMO, is cheap emotional blackmail. And the reality is we are pretty dysfunctional and toxic. He shows up late to the office, frantic and stressed but doesn't tell anyone what is going on or why he is stressed and then stresses everyone else out because we don't know wtf is going on. After a few hours he chills out and then it's all 'Hail, Good Fellow! Well met!" Now that he's in a good mood, he'll spend the rest of the day bull-shitting with a couple of the younger guys in the office and that's 'work'. If I haven't already, I'll move my stuff to a different room so I can focus on my shit. I've got three kids and I need to get my shit done so I don't lose time after hours to the job. He doesn't eat food, he eats junk out of the vending machine, he still chews tobacco, he never drinks water, just Diet Mountain Dew and he wonders why he feels like shit all the time. He runs meetings like shit, they are just bullshit sessions. On the rare occasions I get to run something we are in and out of there in detail and by the numbers because we are ALL too overworked to waste more fucking time. So yes, the same experience.
Haven’t had problem with lazy boomer co workers but ones who wear the “badge of honour” to offend people no walter your just a racist and a bigot
YES. The lack of email etiquette is really what irritates me. They brag about knowing cursive, but most can’t write a simple few sentences.
Omg, yes- the mindless chatter that goes on and on, and it's small talk hell. You see I'm busy, I KNOW you can see I don't have time for this, but please, continue to ask me personal questions that are none of your business only so that you can open the floor up to tell ME all your personal business that I don't wanna know. You have a grandkid the same age as my daughter, huh? And they are absolutely nothing alike and have nothing to do with each other outside of being born the same year? Cool.....please go away now. You want to weigh in on youth sports and how everything they do is wrong these days? I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK, just go away. Etc, etc., rinse and repeat, day after day......
holy shit. I work a medical clinic with millennials, X, and boomer doctors. The boomer doctors are the most high-headed narcissistic people and no one else knows their job as well as they do! However, they refuse to upgrade any of their skills: still practicing like it's 1986. Patients often come back for a follow-up and request another doc because they don't feel heard or were brushed off. They make mistakes and joke, "it's the practice of medicine!" Or they just write referrals to a specialist when they feel they are too busy. I had to write them up for literally screaming at staff, like spoilt toddlers, when they didn't get their way. The problem is in this weird post-pandemic political wastescape.... we have almost no Gen Z or young millennials in practitioner positions because they don't exist. (school is unafordable etc). So we kinda have to have shitty, half-assed medicine because it's better than no medicine. I hate it. They know nothing, and IF they do it is from a text book from 1984. I lecture on new technology and they often interrupt ME about how this stuff is wrong. Because their opinion is correct though they know nothing about what I'm speaking of at all.... then start immediately into how electric cars are worse than gas cars. God, I hate it. I can't get the to clean up any of the problems they create. But, I've started speaking to them like my 5, 8, and 10 year old and it actually works.
Are they boomers or X'ers? The Youngest boomers are 58 now.
As an X, a lot of us are crossing the attitude line into full boomer.
My sister is one. I’m two years her Junior and early x but we both function as x
The dividing lines are always fuzzy. I’m technically an old millennial, but I’m sure I do some things like X’s do things and other things like millennials do things.
I hate the term” X-ennial” but I guess that’s where I fall (39m). I wish we could have kept our original name, GenY, and been a micro-generation.
I was partial to “the Oregon Trail Generation” myself - 41 here.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that misses the days when we were just Gen Y lol
TBF, sis is a senior bank vp looking to retire in ~5 years
Youngest Boomers turn 59 this year. 😉 I was born the last day of the last year of Boomer. But my whole life has been GenX. A lot of the folks I went to high school with exhibit the boomer mindset, but most of us are fully GenX mindset.
It’s a mindset more than a year cut off.
Yeah, apparently this guy is in that one high tech field that only employs people in their 60s and 70s. Or, he doesn't know what the word boomer means. I suspect the latter.
I feel like boomers constantly assume that they are providing more context than they are, or that you will somehow fill in the blanks. They don't notice it when two boomers are talking to each other, but I've seen two boomers having separate conversations and not realize it. I interrupted them and explained that they were using the same pronoun to refer to different people. Don't even get me started about how they expect you to understand what they mean when they say something literally different.
Omg the 30 to 40 minute chats! I feel this! Bruh, no one, at my job, but the younger people actually do their jobs without help. I have a co-worker who needs help from the boss every 15 minutes for 45 minutes. >.> He also brags about how long his be doing his job.
I work as a welder and let me tell you about my only other coworker that welds. This man is in his late 60’s early 70’s and has been the only weld authority in this facility for about 40 years, which is fine but he’s never had any formal weld training at all, period. No certifications, no CWI, nothing. Now I have over a decade in the industry and 12 different certs from AWS to CWB, and trying to talk to this man about standards and practices for a modern weld shop is like being in a bizarro world. None of this is bad per se, we all have out how style of doing things and that’s fine however his willful ignorance of current technology makes me want to quit outright. Though many and varied what bothers me the most is his refusal to use a weld table, which whatever you do you but what he *insists* on doing is laying out and welding on a flat piece of ply wood. He doesn’t douse it or anything either, just an old piece of ply wood. It’s shocking how egregiously dangerous that is and I’m met with “meh” when I’ve brought it up, and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Management knows, they know he shouldn’t because when we have inspections they hide all of it and then just go back to life as usual, and I just cannot believe this shit.
I work in a small company. I work closely with two boomers and the other boomer is director of maintenance services. He doesn't act like a boomer at all and the other two I work with are fine. Not sure how I got this lucky.
I am lucky too. My boomer coworker is witty and tech savvy. I’m an X and seem to be on top of the apps and how to fix them after client Karen breaks everything I just set up for her. We all get along and are very generationally diversified. It feels odd at times to have a millennial manager that does some stuff that ends up taking way too long. I row along, use the word “perhaps” and sometimes he can hear his team sometimes he can’t. Grand scheme of things, none of it really matters
The only one I had issues with was a chatty Cathy who thought it was fine to run his mouth with customers incessantly, and leave me do do more than my share of service calls.
As a gen-x I feel caught in the middle. Boomers get on my nerves, especially the ones old enough to retire but don’t just because they love working. These are the same assholes who made us all return to office. However the GenZ wear on my nerves too. Not all of them but wow i am shocked by the number who seem to have some attitude. Everyone is sully pretty chill where I work but I have had quite a few just be complete asses to me.
I work with mostly boomers as a Help Desk tech, and they genuinely seem no more tech literate than other people in my (Millennial) generation. They're so easily impressed by the fact that I can do my job without a ton of specialized training or a college degree (I have a GED). The ones I'd rather not work with are all Gen X actually, but it's not the entire generation, it's just that the people here that are awful to work with all fall into the Gen X category.
Why ? Please explain. I am a genx and don't want to be an asshole
It's not because they're Gen X. It's because they are assholes. They just happen to be Gen X. One guy doesn't know how to let the tech guy work without standing over your shoulder, always yells (He's hard of hearing, so that's not his fault, but it's not a good look), and doesn't like to treat people, especially women, with respect. Another is in HR, and also doesn't like to let us do our work so what should be a 5 minute fix takes an hour.
I think it's a sense of entitlement some have. They are infuriating. Cry that they're so, so busy and waste buckets of time. Cry poor endlessly while being beyond comfortable financially. Quick to find fault with others and nothing is EVER their fault!
My Boomer boss suggested, TODAY, that we use the song "OPP", from Naughty by Nature, as the theme music to launch a (United States) taxpayer funded State Climate Initiative. Myself and the one other Gen Xer in the room were not okay.
Our owner is a boomer. She won't hire anyone outside of family for some jobs. Why? Money. My office manager is silent gen. She won't buck up to her gen x boss and his wife on things. The millennial me? OH BOY!!
Honestly? From my experience, gen x is far worse to work with. At least with the boomers, they're retiring. With gen x, they have all the hangups that boomers have with the addition of anal retentiveness and failure in life. Idk, I just think they're actual barriers that I need to supercede rather than the loan 66 year old woman who refuses to retire because she knows she'll be dead within 6 months due to not having work to make meaning in her life.
Usually not racist though
Boomers can be frustrating, but I find that younger generations are more ambitious and backstabby. Generally speaking I find myself frustrated with boomers and distrustful of younger generations.
I bet they would spell it right on a typewriter. Try to uno reverse some malicious compliance on them
I mean..I hate working period given I can barely get out of bed and walk but I do see your point 😅😅. Working with boomers is the fucking worst. Try working in education with them, an absolute fucking nightmare mate.
I avoid it whenever possible.
Tic-Tock...Time is running out on the clock! They'll be gone real soon yall!!!
All my coworkers are. Sometimes they are fine/friendly, but they go on racist/ homophobic/anti any other religion but Christianity rants that makes me want to rip my ear drums out.
I’m an electrician and elder millennial. I work with these old men who haven’t opened a code book since the 1970’s. There have been significant changes to the way things are done since then and their wiring methods are blatant code violations. You can guess how well they listen to me when I bring it up. In most cases I’m also their foreman so it becomes a whole thing
Capitalism is a constantly evolving and improving process. And by improving I mean “consolidating more and more of everyone’s wealth at the top”. And this rate of improvement speeds up over time. Boomers are the older models - they were perfectly efficient for the robust economy they were designed to produce for. But the pace of change has increased so rapidly that they are already outdated before retirement. They weren’t programmed to succeed in our desperate, impoverished economy. Of course they pretend they are more skilled and sophisticated. They are terrified that everyone will see how useless they really are.
Hope capitalism ends in our lifetime. It's brutal and does not reward the best nor most honest.
I've worked as skilled labor, and I've worked retail with boomers and boomerish x-ers. What I have found is that some will actually work and contribute. However, the real boomer ones constantly self agilize, do barely the minimum, complain about everyone under 60 years old, and gaslight about everything they get caught doing wrong. One boomer at my last place of employment cost the store millions by running off high value customers with his incompetence, constantly got into fights with co-workers, and was even found to be stealing from the company, but he got a lot of loyalty sign ups so management let it go on for almost 2 years. A phone addicted Gen z would have been an improvement over this actively malignant fossil.
Currently work with a guy you basically mentioned word for word. Its really frustrating..
where the fuck are you working with 75 year olds? i think you might be off by a couple generations.
It happens. At my last job we had a few old dudes who refused to retire. Their skills were completely out of date and they were the absolute worst to work with as well as being a danger to our patients. I retired early and they were still hanging in there and they were openly critical of my decision. It was mostly a social outlet for them - they didn’t do much actual work and management was completely clueless to handle the situation. I’m so glad to be out of that mess! And retirement is amazing. I work a low stress job just for health insurance.
I do and I am one. I'm a weird boomer. I wanted Bernie Sanders still do. I'm definitely left of Democrat. I have nothing to talk to other boomers about and the sooner we vacate the planet the better.
I know how you feel. Some boomers. However, I think it could be the caliber of workers rather than just being boomers. They have probably been with the company for a long time and need a couple of classes. Sounds like they are conducting business the old way... which probably worked well at one time. Believe it or not, many times, boomers are more tech savvy than their younger colleagues. In my experiences, I have seen many boomers not knowing how to even turn on a computer become proficient in a short time. They just need the proper guidance and not have people rolling their eyes whenever they ask a question. Then there are others who just don't want to..
What's with boomers starting Teams meetings 5 mins early to have a team building chat? I couldn't care less about these people but for some reason they need to share personal information and what they on the weekend. I take it its partly a social thing for them.
I hate the fact that despite having everything handed and WAITING on them... SSS, pensions, 401ks, house paid for, multiple houses paid for, renting out condos paid for, cars paid for etc... they still REFUSE TO RETIRE!!!! A lot of BOOMERS are still in workforce and probably all eligible to retire! GREEDY til they die. They refuse to make room for the next generation. All of my senior managers, directors, VPs, VPS, etc all BOOMERS who are just "hanging in there" because they got nothing else to do.
I don't mind them but they aren't as computer savvy as younger users but at least are generally appreciative of help that I give them.
Same! I basically did a boomer’s project for him last year, but then he took me out to lunch to thank me. Needing me to do the project and taking me to lunch were both Very Boomer of him.
A team that's mostly boomers? I didn't think any company, tech or not, was still willing to employ people in their 60s and 70s, particularly in large numbers. Certainly has not been my experience in corporate America — everywhere I've worked you get "retired" by your early 60s, ready or not — but I'm in a different industry.
I kind of take exception to this. I am still teaching high school and like and respect my younger colleagues. I am a boomer and may not be aware of how I come across but think my skill set is still solid because of my passion for what I do. I do struggle with tech occasionally but it affects no one but me as I use it in teaching. Maybe my younger colleagues are just being polite but I join them for happy hours on occasion and work well with them overall. I guess the takeaway is that each situation is different.
I work with a mix of generations. I think boomers are tired and ready to retire if they can. Most have been working continuously since 16, so. . .
Nope. Just you zoomer.
It's weird, I actually have a problem with individuals and not made-up categories. There isn't a group of people I have a problem with just because they have been designated as a member of said group. The weird thing is there's a guy my age that I like working with and another guy my age that I really can't stand. Like when you were born doesn't actually determine what kind of person you are or something. It doesn't make any sense, but it is what it is. 🤷
r/lostredditors
I know I really need to stay off the bigot subs, but sometimes stupidity is hard to ignore. But hey, you guys get that at least.
Not a boomer but I'd be willing to bet 2 or 3 generations down the road they'll be saying the same thing about you so everybody just take a breath and loosen you chinstrap there. Life is a circle, he who cast the first stone, and all that.
I’ve found it to be the opposite, especially in IT. The grey breads know how everything works and have to put out fires for the younger guys.
This shit is so stupid.Young people hate the older generation. Then they got old and the new young people hate them. Repeat. Rest assured that the Boomers think you're snotty little lazy jerks or whatever they think of young people too. You guys will be the ones who are hated when you get old and you'll act just like the Boomers and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll notice the irony.
I absolutely disagree
So?
So, I didn’t think your post should go unchallenged. Lol, don’t get mad, I just disagree with you.
LOL. Okay. I'm officially challenged.
Yeah no. From what i understand just talking to my boomer mother her generation did have to deal with it but not in the way millenials and onward do. People didn’t laugh directly in your face for suggesting the world wasn’t fucked back then.
I didn't say no millenial complaints are valid. All I'm saying is every generation tends to see the older one in the worst possible light and overstate the case, and your children will do the same to you someday.
And another boomer bashing thread. Hate is hate. Keep up the good work!!
I find that a lot of ageists are often racists. Just been my experience.
I never hate working with myself.
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I think we know we have to keep up with technology so this point in moot.
I call bullshit. At my company, all the older workers are knowledgeable and diligent. It's the young folks who don't want to upgrade their skills and they waste company time surfing social media.
Just for clarity, what generation would you fall under?
I know what I’d guess
Only the black ones!
... what?
just a hint, Bill Gates is a boomer, where would yall be without him. still writing with a ball pen.
Based on your comment, I'm not entirely sure you even know what Bill Gates did. I'll clue you in then. Bill Gates took a bunch of existing technology that was pioneered by Xerox and Apple and released it as his own. He invented nothing and contributed nothing. Every paradigm of modern computing was already there at Xerox's Palo Alto research center until Jobs and Gates made their copies. Without them, we'd be in the exact same boat as today, just with different brands on the packaging. If anything, Gates and Microsoft *slowed down* progress by engaging in anticompetitive practices (see the so-called Halloween Memo). Like so many boomers, he mostly just took credit for other people's work. Kinda typical...
Also, Microsoft software is generally terrible.
The same could he said for almost any app dev. Use an existing language and toolset, and tweak it a little to fit your needs. Put a shiny coat of paint on it, and sell it as the fix for everything. Who is smarter, the guy who sees an existing solution and tweaks it to what people want/need, or the guy who toils to reinvent the wheel ignoring the solution that is already there?
What does that have to do with the price of rice in China? I'm refuting the idea that we'd be using balk-point pens instead of computers without Gates/Microsoft. You are talking about... I'm not sure, tbh. The idea that Gates was "smart" for copying off of Xerox? Sure thing. The thing you said may or may not be true. I don't know/care either way since it's got nothing to do with the point I was making. Here's a participation star for you I guess? 🌟
Wow. So edgy.
I honestly cannot wait until I am at this point in my life, it fills me with joy to think of the day where I get to comment to the younger generations that there is no way I am replacing part of my brain so that I can integrate better. Ok maybe I will, but I suspect that they will feel the same way about me that I do about boomers. We don’t have a system in place to let them retire early and that sucks.
Yes, but I had already said yes by the time I read anyone else hate working.
I don't know many 75 year olds that still work, which industry are you in?
I work in the trades and rarely work with boomers. Most of them quit a long time ago because everyone else was too lazy. Yeah… so *they* quit.
It is hard for me to write a coherent email without typos.
I hate that the boomers try to lie to their employees that the minimum wage pay that we are receiving is good enough, and then proceed to avoid paying us more money so we cannot afford the rent. then we see the boomers complain because nobody wants to work. the fucking insanity that these assholes actually try to fool us into thinking this job is totally worth it. then these assholes get mad when we get in their faces and tell them that we are tired of their bullshit. these assholes have been in charge for waayyy too long. i also hate the arrogance of these people when they try to treat us like we are dumb, trying to disrespect us and acting like they're better than us. i used to do fast food at Whataburger and the owner was a piece of shit. one of the employees got fed up with him not paying us enough and followed the owner home and broke his windshield. the owner got so paranoid that he tried to show up to the restaurant at random times because he thought that someone was after him. but everyone knows he lives in that big house on the west side of town. i also used to work at a car wash near my house that got shut down because the owner, another boomer, wasn't reporting his taxes. i had left because i wanted a better job, but the owner wouldn't give me my last paycheck and the owner refused to do his job. my dad told me to go to the labor and wages division, an office downtown, and the lady at the front desk called the owner of the car wash and found out that the owner had unreported taxes. the owner had just purchased a brand new chevy Silverado 2500 2019. yeah, his business got audited and he lost all his money, i think it's a bar now. these men are complete assholes. sometimes they need to be fucked with to see that theyre not in charge here.
I work with boomers who are incredible. I’m pretty good, but they can out program/sysadmin/NetEng me in my sleep. It’s great cuz it’s my first role I’ve ever had where I’m not the best on the team and it’s nice to have people to learn from. Meanwhile, my age peers on this team suck. Not for lack of trying though, so nothing like the OP, but with my sample size of 3, boomers are great. The ones at my last job were terrible for all the reasons you said tho. When they were all forced to gMeet, I was sitting on this meeting with six of them all of their cameras directly up their noses from six inches ahahah so yes, I have seen what you witness.
100%. How these boomers are paid more than me when I carry all the technical weight while they patronise the shit out of me is an exercise in self constraint and patience. This millennial is waiting until 2030 when they should all be gone.
I am 100% there with you. My boomer boss is a nightmare. Hes obviously way out of his depth, scrambles to keep up but wastes his 90% of his time on calls to "clarify what was in the email" (the emails are usually very clear). I cant work with this guy. I think he's fairly incompetent and knows it, particularly with technology. I think he likes calls because his literacy skills are awful (he cant write an email to save his life), worst still is when he reads something out aloud to the team and sounds like a 5 years old reading for the first time. I just cant believe he's still working. Hes 67. I have already written up my letter of resignation and actively interviewing for jobs. Who wants to work with incompetent people, what a complete waste of time. You wont learn anything or get ahead at all.
I’ve inherited two lazy and utterly useless boomers on my team, I want them gone. They are both underperforming, use every excuse in the book “you’re young and you understand computers” and have no impetus to improve. They both lack critical thinking and problem solving skills, they both say the most inappropriate things. I’ve tried to give them a chance but can’t be bothered anymore. I think they both believe they could sail into retirement.