My experience is that all of this is sort of nonsense. When I was in college, you could not assume that everyone had email. Now you can. No doubt, when many people in the “Millenial” or Gen Y category were in college, not everyone had facebook accounts, but now almost everyone they experience in their lives probably does. But these kinds of differences are happening at a pace that anyone can adapt to if they choose to. I witnessed my parents go from being completely paper-based, to writing fortran for mainframes (Dad), to using a DEC terminal from home to conduct research (Mom and Dad), to using a PC for writing journal articles and books, to using lexis-nexus searches and medline to find relevant reference material for doctors… to using iphones. My point being: the ability of a person to adapt is tremendous. All of the adaptions I just described, of my parents, were accomplished when they were 40 and up. Granted, it isn’t scientific, but I also experienced this in college- meeting professors and scientists who had learned how to write software as adults, or learned a foreign language as an adult.

Paul Kunz, a high energy physicist at Stanford’s Linear Accelerator (SLAC) when I was an intern there, once reacted to my surprise at how quickly he was assimilating a new concept into his software design… his comment was (paraphrasing): “Scott, *learning* is a skill too, and I treat it that way. I’ve been perfecting my learning skill for 50 years, how long have you been at it?” He really pioneered the transition from fortran to C++ at high energy particle colliders, and he coached me through an interesting project porting a statistical application from NeXT to vanilla unix. But what I benefited from most, was the notion that learning is just another skill to perfect and work on… and it has helped keep me open minded to learn all the different skills and topics that have been useful to me in my career.

My recommendation to anyone worried or optimistic about millenials or genY or the next gen after that: treat them as the individuals they are. The generalizations won’t be much help for dealing with your own children or others’. Like geographic stereotypes, age stereotypes, and other stereotypes, they have a small amount of utility for describing a group as a whole, and negative utility for understanding a single individual. When you make assumptions based on generation you’re inviting misunderstandings.

Sorry for the length of the comment

Happy Holidays. Maybe we can get together sometime in the new year.