Baby Boomers and how we/they are perceived in today's world

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At the gig last week I heard the phrase "Someone your age" from two different people.

And there goes yet another self termination trigger.

Perspective of someone who is 33, but lives in an area where the median age is 60.

Boomers have vast institutional knowledge, but zero wisdom. None whatsoever.

When I was younger, I found this to be incredibly frustrating. I 100% could not depend on the advice of older people, which made life so much harder than it otherwise would’ve been.

I had no one to ask questions to, and I was forced to learn virtually everything the hard way, as older folks lack wisdom and tend to keep their knowledge proprietary.

Thankfully, Gen X seems to have gained some wisdom, and they’re significantly less likely to keep their knowledge proprietary, so hopefully this will not be an issue for future generations.

To MaxE:

Agreed that grouping people into "generations" that are 15 to 20 years in length is a vast oversimplifcation. Agreed, for example, that late baby-boomers came of age in a very different era than early baby-boomers did.

I also think there has been way too much a tendency to over-generalize about people based on age cohort. Even if the age cohorts are defined in a more fine-grained way than the popular 15-to-20-year "generations," there are many other factors besides age and a given decade's mass-culture fads that can affect a person's experiences growing up. For example, it can make a huge difference whether a person grew up in a city, a suburb, or a rural area. Also a person's racial/ethnic background, religious background (if any), economic class, and parents' level of education can make a huge difference.

To bsickler:

A P.S. to my post here:

I am under the impression that Cascadia (or at least parts of Oregon and Washington) has long been a magnet for hippies. So I wonder if many of the older folks you run into might be aging hippies, from well-to-do backgrounds, who live mainly off of trust funds and thus have had little need to acquire any practical "wisdom."

If so, they are not typical of boomers in other parts of North America, nor even typical of the minority of boomers who are aging hippies (or at least the ones who are from non-well-to-do backgrounds and live in places other than Cascadia).

Of course, more generally, retirees and people near the end of their career might not be able to give you good up-to-date advice on things like the specifics of how today's job market works. But this doesn't necessarily mean they lack other kinds of "wisdom."

I remember a story my father told me: There was a man going down to the river with a large sack on his back; he was asked by this person he passed on the road what he had in the sack; he replied "it's my father; he is old and useless and his ideas are so out of date, I'm going to throw him in the river. The person he passed told him to be sure and save the bag for his own son. I find it amusing that the people who hate on boomers now are going to be hated by the younger generation that follows them and they don't yet realize it.

The specific area I live in has a pretty high average age (as I mentioned in my post) and I interact with baby boomers regularly, so yes I likely do have more experience and interaction with that age group than the average person does because of the specific area I live in.

I can say pretty confidently that these people are not, and never have been hippies. I can’t really divulge further without doxing myself but needless to say, this ain’t Seattle. Or Portland for that matter.

That being said, I’ve lived in several other places before, and my job in my 20s involved extensive travel throughout the country, and my experience with this age group hasn’t really changed much.

Baby boomers have a tendency to conflate institutional knowledge with wisdom. These are not the same thing -
wisdom involves a certain amount of perspective and the ability to make sound judgments about a subject, while institutional knowledge is simply knowing a lot about said subject.

Boomers are extremely well versed in almost everything. They are extremely knowledgeable. But I’ve found that virtually all baby boomers I have interacted with IRL so far lack perspective, and either practice or promote bad judgement, even about things that they know about.

I realize I’m painting a huge brush here, and my interactions with boomers online are generally much better / more fruitful, but I feel like (and my personal experience says that) the boomers I meet online are largely self-selecting and not representative as the whole IRL

As for keeping stuff proprietary, I figure it’s because of competition- boomers spent their entire lives competing with other boomers, which encourages keeping information private to maintain an advantage. Gen X is smaller and doesn’t have that problem which explains why I’ve never had issues getting useful info/tips from them at work.

I consider myself "generation Jones" as some demographers term the latter part of the baby boomers who came late to the party.

The authors of the Agile Manifesto seem to have been predominantly Boomers or Generation Jones. But software development (the target of the Agile Manifesto) is not really the same as engineering. Communication, apart from raw technical expertise, is arguably the key to success in any project (considering so many projects fail) — which is something anyone on the AS should seriously consider if contemplatng a career in that field.