After watching this hilarious Daily Show clip about MySpace (from the videos thread) I got to thinking:

What will today's kids, the "Millennial Generation", born ~82~92, be like as business people and young professionals, regarding their social ability? These are kids raised keeping track of "9000 friends", maintaining "instant connect, instant disconnect" distributed friendships, able to chat in multiple fast pased chat rooms at once, etc.

I wonder if this will turn the business world around. I don't know enough about how Gen-X does business, so I can't dream up any good examples. I just wonder if we "older folks" (27 here) will need some survival skills to keep up when Gen-Y is our boss or equal.

Speaking as one of these "old fogeys" (34 years old) with several younger people working for me, I think we need to do exactly what the really old fogeys have done: adapt or give up. Remember email? That's the natural thing for "us" while the really old folks had to adapt to it. Many did. Surprisingly many didn't.

Now, I've got a stupid Google Talk window on the side of my screen. Occasionally one of my students uses it to contact me. I live. Likewise, my grad students told me I was an old fogey for trying to teach the students in my class how to use CVS. Now, we're doing Subversion, along with Trac bugtracking (TAs filing bugs against students' projects!), some sort of Wiki software, as well as a dedicated IRC server where TAs hang out, all to manage a sophomore CS course. Overkill? Hard to say, but the students dig it, particularly having the IRC logs show up on a web server. Meanwhile, I'm teaching the same "old school" algorithms and data structures course, not unlike what students were taught 20 years ago...

That's what I'm talking about. We'll have to watch for the ways to adapt so we don't have to give up. Maybe we should keep watching the Daily Show for those youth culture updates. Can't I subscribe to a "youth culture watch" RSS feed so I'm always up on things... without having to be into them?

Regarding the old school algorithms, the content doesn't change, just the delivery. Maybe you should txt them to your students.

I'm not remotely daunted by the technology or the "new new age" social skills - most of those things have developed from ideas my generation pioneered! The only problem I might have is understanding what the hell the youf are talking about, due to their inability to type and/or spell properly. The gangsta speak doesn't help either. Seriously, have you seen any youngster's MySpace pages?

In practice it won't be a problem because I won't hire anyone who applies for a job in txt.

Rob

Who said anything about paper resumes?

Email attachments, in plain text, are the universal standard for these things right now.

Cheers

Reminds me when I was looking for a job. Bashed out a snazzy looking CV in LaTeX, and with a bit of tweaking I had versions which looked near enough identical in plain text, HTML (XHTML Valid naturally) and PDF. Was quite proud of myself until I realised virtually all employers wanted Microsoft Word.

So, I pasted it into OpenOffice v0.0000001a, edited the formatting and the conversion was terrible. It made me so angry, words cannot describe. Cue lots of swearing and cycling to the library to use a Windows computer every time I made an edit.

The last time I was actively looking for a job and used PDF, about half of the recruiters who got back in touch with me told me they had no idea how to open a PDF file. Which makes me wonder about the ones who didn't get back in touch at all.

RTF is a not-terrible intermediate step between a real open standard and Word.

We've just done a new product mail out in PDF format, loads of people didn't know how to open the attachment.

I think I did some testing and Word was smart/stupid enough to open an RTF file properly even if it had a ".doc" file extension.

Formatting is not important for most "big companies" as they just automatically word search the word document for key words that match the job spec (which makes getting an interview easy if you can figure out what the key words might be)

Did you have to hand write it in that special drafting font? Wpw, "back in the day" people had to manually do intricate tasks which computers do instantly.

I'd hate to submit a resume via Word DOC, but oh well. Hopefully if I were hired, I could convince people to use PDF instead because it looks better. And heck, it's advanced search shows you an index of all the times the search string appears in the document. Got Word beat there.

Entry level drafters, were expected to hold the pristine block form. Those with enough experience could get by with a style that looks like what is used in most comic strips.

BTW: the font Comic SansSerif is alternatly called Blueprint by them who find it politically incorrect to use a font called Comic on a "Serious" Engineering Document.

Ah, traditions. If only I could have applicants for my job uphold traditions of DOS commands and Windows keyboard shortcuts. Alt-F6! Ctrl-Insert! Shift-F10! And all those window manupulation shortcuts which have long since been repurposed (Alt F5, F6, F8, F9?)

OK, I use the keyboard almost exclusively, and Ctrl-Insert and Shift-F10 I know, but what did Alt-F6 do?

Remember F-3 before Doskey was invented?

Makes me nostalgic for copy con and edlin....

Paul: NICE!

Lectric: Alt-F6 switches between windows of a program. Ctrl-F6 switches between windows inside a program window. Try it with multiple Firefox, Microsoft Word, or Adobe Acrobat windows. Ctrl-Tab used to do the job nicely, but hardly works anywhere anymore. And don't forget to add the Shift modifier to go backward through the set.

I'll never forget how Word 6 showed all the shortcuts for windowing (minimize, maximize, restore, size, move) in the Alt-Space menu ("minus menu" from Win 3.1, currently the program icon at left of the title bar). Both Ctrl and Alt for F5, F7, F8, F9, and F10, I think, but it's tough to remember. That's why the famous Alt-F4 is close; just another windowing function.

Good to know... I use ctrl-tab all the time, wasn't aware of ctrl-f6.

Paul, that WAS really funny.