Thoughts on the evolution of work

 I listened carefully yesterday to a group of older people (20+ my senior) speak passionately about how they just can’t get good work done without looking at others and being able to hear their conversations across the room or down the hall, and how they can’t wait to get back to full time office work even thought their jobs don’t require in-person interaction (information jobs).

I can’t relate to this at all, and I am starting to think it is an almost absolute generational divide. There are always exceptions, but I think I and my generation (especially those younger than me) are much more comfortable communicating, collaborating, and creating over telecom than most older people, and that this is not just incidental, or pop culture BS, or whatever. It’s becoming a real drag on the sectors of our economy that have decision makers and hiring managers of the previous generation who are fundamentally missing out on opportunities to hire and retain people who CAN and even LIKE to work remotely, and will do it better than previous generations even think possible. And I am not trying to run anybody down, here. It’s totally understandable that people born before 1975 might have this particular set of skills that make one kind of work environment work really well for them. That’s ok. The only problem is if you think that’s the only way to work effectively because it’s the way you work best, without realizing that effective work environments are influenced and created by people, and as people change (they way we communicate, the tools we use natively, the way we think and process information), those standards change too. It has to be both, and; it can’t be one way or the other, not anymore.

I was really discouraged hearing this echo chamber (and I didn’t feel experienced enough to bring up my point of view, so I perpetuated the echo chamber, unfortunately), because this was a discussion around why these people, hiring managers all, were pretty much refusing to post remote jobs for developers and other IT people. They also defended their decisions to post ridiculous job listings with super specific requirements because they “just don’t have time to teach anyone anything.” That’s a recipe for stagnation in an industry that needs innovative thinkers and fresh ideas to stay relevant (traditional higher education). It SUCKS that training someone in IT in the higher ed environment often means you train someone else’s worker, because that person leaves for better pay after a year. So rather than pretend that’s the worker’s fault and fight it by forcing new workers to fit in an old and inflexible mold, let’s solve that problem by investigating how to compensate those positions competitively, including perks like remote work options, but also just straight up compensating professional experts appropriately and removing unecessary management positions, as well as unecessary physical assets like office space, etc. Traditional higher ed, the kind that takes up brick and mortar space as one of its primary indicators of success *isn’t coming back* the same.  Not just from the pandemic, but from fifteen years of ⚡️ fast technological evolution, itself built on sixty years of computer science before that. We need to radically reevaluate what we care about: retaining power as exemplified by the space we own on campus, the control we think we have over workers when we have them all within our sight and earshot, or are we invested in progress, innovation, and creativity however we can get it, wherever we can get it, and whoever we can recruit no matter who they are?