This series of posts covers a number of issues related to the differences in generations, specifically in engineering organizations. Today’s post cites an interesting table from Rawn Shah on the differences in how people from different generations work and puts it into the context of an engineering organization.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken a look at a judo-move for Boomer engineers, the rare resource that GenX engineers might become and the misalignment between GenY expectations and the historical development of an engineer over time. And there’s a lot of detail that we missed along the way. There truly are dramatic differences across generations in engineering. But back in July, Rawn Shah who is a consultant for social networking for business over at IBM, contributing an interesting post to Forbes.com called Why You Must Network With Your Younger Employees (nod o’ thanks to @abelniak on twitter). Now I disagree with Rawn on several points in this post including his statements saying that Boomers hoard and control information and the fact that he grouped GenY’ers and Millenials together, but he posted a very interesting table that compares and contrasts some characteristics across generations:

forbestable

When you put this into the context of engineering, some interesting things captured my attention.

  • Problem solving is right at the top of the list, and if there’s anything a really good engineer needs to do, it’s solve problems. I have seen Boomers tend towards a roll up approach to problems compared to GenY’ers, who are open and don’t care as much who exactly gets credit at the end of the day.
  • In recent times, the job of engineering a product has only become more distributed, whether that’s across multiple company technical centers or in collaboration with suppliers. It’s also become more program and project focused in that large and tough problems are cut up, distributed and then solved. In this way, task focus and communication becomes critical. And from the initiatives that I’ve seen, multi-tasking and over-communication has become a higher priority.
  • From a decision making and learning style perspective, I’ve also seen more and more engineering organizations move towards an emphasis on team consensus and support as opposed to the single hero who shoulders the biggest burden. However that desire to become less reliant on a single individual hasn’t kept many from going back to the well when an engineering project is really in a pinch.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours? Do you agree with how Mr. Shah has characterized different generations in workplace? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Take care. Talk soon. And thanks for reading.