I found this via Kevin's blog<<
The Side-Takers by Tom Kendall
I know there’s an entire type of annoying article that just yells at the culture for using the terminology it commonly uses. And I know that in terms of effectiveness it’s about like bowling with a croissant. But damn it, listen to me for a minute.As we near another September 11th, I got to thinking about something. Why in the Hell do people call my generation Millennials?
I get the theory. The turn of the Millennium was, in theory, the defining event of our generation. But—why? Because it’s a big round number? Neat. And? So, what? Does the number do tricks or something?
I think part of what happened is that the romantic ideas of what the 2000s would be like, which were sold to the Baby Boomers en masse, gave the number 2000 an emotional imprint way outsized to its actual significance. When the year 2000 actually came, the number of personal robot servants was zero; the number of flying cars was one, technically, and the FAA refused to let it fly; the number of physics-violating food pills was—and will remain—zero; the number of moon colonies was—and I would like to imagine won’t remain, but who knows—zero. You know what 2000 actually brought in practice? A misinformed scare about some badly-written computer code and a party that took a week to clean up from. As I recall, that was all.
Read the rest HERE<<
Because at the time that generation was awarded the appellation it hadn't yet done anything worthy of note. Now look, this guy demands are attention, damn it. See how he cast aspersions on a prior generation. I'm sure those will help his cause which, other than grumbling about a name, isn't stated. Wait, you mean that's it, that he just wants to complain? Oh, well, at least he could get paid by the word count and drag on and on and on.... Like that hasn't been done before.
ReplyDeleteRick
The Y2K issue was a non-issue precisely because thousands of programmers spent millions of hours going over every line of legacy code in the world. Nearly all of it was in privately owned business, so no real stats exist on how many problems were found and cured. I was part of it, and spent several months doing the drudge work. It was necessary. It was real. There were an enormous number of programs that were still using code and design paradigms from the 60s and 70s, when nobody believed in code longevity.
ReplyDeleteGranted, the computing world has changed so much so many times since then that probably very little of that legacy code exists anymore, nor most of the computer systems that those programs ran on. But these days nobody anywhere codes "repeat until date=123199" or uses a 2 digit year. Lessons learned.
Millennials are called millennials because they were born in the 80s and 90s and afterwards, and grew up in an increasingly digital world. They don't know how to use a rotary phone, a turntable, a phone book, read a paper map, or even read an analog clock. The kids in high school today are all born post-9/11. Whether they still count as millennials I don't know. Even recent college graduates were too young to have experienced 9/11 as a formative event even though they were alive at the time.
And he misspelled Berkeley.
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