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.
Innovate in Your Downtime
If this time of year is typically slow for you, give your engineering team space to innovate.
During the holiday season, most organizations take their foot off the proverbial pedal. While there are several companies who see November and December as their busiest time of year, the rest of us see the next few weeks as a montage of empty (that is, emptier than usual) buildings, quiet Slack/Teams workspaces, and out-of-office messages.