Engage Gen X Engineers
You might need to rethink the way you engage with your Gen X engineers.
I celebrated my birthday this week. My age ain’t your business, but Taylor and I were born on the same day—different years, of course—and you should know that I’m Gen X: the “Forgotten Generation”.
I’ve built websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver. I’ve used the WSC’s validation service on XHTML before FTP-ing it to Media Temple servers. I’ve driven to an office at 3:30am to manually deploy PHP code from my desktop, and paid for parking tickets because I forgot to move my car before 9am. I’ve waited days to have a Tomcat server provisioned. I can’t tell you how many unfinished web frameworks I’ve written—and checked into Subversion—but the number is high. I’ve wrestled with Oracle 10g, my friends, and I’m still alive.
Because I’ve done those things, I have a specific appreciation for many advances made in tech over the last few decades. And I also understand the messy stuff that’s been abstracted out of today’s engineering workflows. That insight is valuable. My experience can save your team time.
While a person’s date of birth can’t tell you everything you need to know about them, it can provide useful context that can help you understand how they might approach a situation. Spend a few minutes on LinkedIn, and you’ll see posts about GenZ, millennials, and boomers (and you should read those, because you’ll be working with those folks) but you might not see much about Gen X. Despite the fact that we’ve again slipped under everyone else’s radar, we’re around.
So how do you tap into the wealth of knowledge available in your resilient, pragmatic, hard-working Gen X engineers?
Check in on them. Not superficially, either. You have to be intentional about it, and move past the I’m-alive-it’s-not-a-big-deal-I’m-fine-let’s-move-on word soup they’ll throw back at you. Show them you care. Support them.
Assess performance objectively. Employ rubrics and career ladders to help your entire team understand expectations for their role and level. Hold calibration sessions to ensure that leaders are aligned on the differences between L5 and L6 engineers, for example. Reduce bias in your performance assessment process, and clearly communicate how promotion decisions are made. There’s an added bonus here: Gen X-ers value diversity, and you’ll need to apply this kind of mindset to build and retain a diverse team.
Reward them in meaningful ways. Understand what your Gen X employees value, and reward them accordingly. Don’t forego changes in cash and equity, but also consider schedule flexibility and additional autonomy. Provide learning & development opportunities to allow them to learn new skills.
If you think those tips apply to other generations and other industries, you’re correct. People are people. You’ve been fooled into reading another post about treating people with dignity. I apologize for nothing.
Photo by Ben Robbins on Unsplash.