Suggestions for dealing with an old-school boss

pinchvalve (Forum Supporter) said:

what are your tips for dealing with a dinosaur? 

Have some compassion. You will be the dinosaur sooner than you realize. One day you are at the top of your game using the most up to date tech and then you blink and all the young kids have passed you buy. 

dean1484 said:

pinchvalve (Forum Supporter) said:

what are your tips for dealing with a dinosaur? 

Have some compassion. You will be the dinosaur sooner than you realize. One day you are at the top of your game using the most up to date tech and then you blink and all the young kids have passed you buy. 

My granddad took an early retirement offer (state employee, they had a budget issue and buying out people in the top 1/3 of the payrolls was one solution). He says one of the major reasons he did is because he could tell that he'd gone from embracing/wanting the new more efficient tools to being bothered by them and unwilling to move on from what he was currently doing/using. 

I thought that was incredibly self-aware, and I try to remember it. I'm somewhere in the middle of my career and I've already gone from the guy they call to try out a new program or ET tool to the guy sometimes having to call some of the younger guys to help me with E36 M3, and I'm sure that trend continues.

GameboyRMH said:

As a (former?) IT guy it hurts that a person with such outdated skills gets to have a job in 2024.

 

That's quite an attitude to take. Statements like this could be why you are a former IT guy. 

I had to read through half of the first page before I realized this wasn't about an old school bus project.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

I see the same thing every time I see this thread!

Toyman! said:

GameboyRMH said:

As a (former?) IT guy it hurts that a person with such outdated skills gets to have a job in 2024.

 

That's quite an attitude to take. Statements like this could be why you are a former IT guy. 

 

We all have strengths and weaknesses.  

Our #1, 40 year sales veteran sold $10,000,000+ worth of hoses and hydraulic fittings and was $1,000,000 ahead of the 2nd place salesperson. This was across 35 USA branch locations. 

Yet on Saturday morning I had to show him repeatedly how to put "little boxes" around the numbers on his excel sheet.  

Maximize a persons strengths and minimize their weaknesses.  

In reply to Toyman! :

I'm sure anyone else who's worked in IT would feel the same. It's a career that puts you on a nonstop learning treadmill, can barely restrain itself from asking for more years of experience in a technology than years the technology has existed, loves the new and fresh so much that it discriminates against older workers and it's largely just accepted as a fact of life, and unceremoniously kicks hordes of highly skilled workers to the curb because it suddenly needs less of them due to centralization or a need to shovel every resource into chasing a silly new trend that wows investors.

When your career revolves around how close to the bleeding edge your skills are and your job is something between precarious and nonexistent these days even if you've been keeping up, seeing a dinosaur with skills so massively outdated that accommodating him holds his whole company back still being employed hurts.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Sounds like the IT skills aren't really important for success in that role. Which tracks for many sales roles. 

mtn said:

Sounds like the IT skills aren't really important for success in that role. Which tracks for many sales roles. 

Yeah, sales is all about person-to-person contact.  It's a job for extroverts, whereas IT is much more of an introvert role.

In reply to mtn :

It sounds like this boss' problems aren't with the date of his IT skills but the date of his paperwork and communications skills (on top of what sounds like weird disdain for a whole segment of sales skills - was there ever a time when salespeople thought that trying to reach out to new customers was a waste of time?).

If there was an IT worker who had decent IT skills but insisted on sending messengers on horseback instead of making phone calls, and writing manuals on scrolls instead of uploading them to the company wiki, they wouldn't last 3 seconds. I don't know how this sales boss gets away with basically doing the same thing (and worse) in his industry.

I debated replying to this, because my message isn't going to be positive.  Take it with a grain of salt.  Here goes;

Either find a new job, get moved to a different area so you have a different boss, or just get used to it because he's not changing.  I've never had a boss that was really eager to keep changing what they accepted.  They might not sing their songs as loudly but they'll never forget the words.

Good luck with this one.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Please save this for your thread and don't derail this one with things that in no way relate to the OP. 

In regards to OP, unfortunately I've never worked with a truly "old school" school boss. I graduated college in Dec 2005. Everything has always been done electronically, except for one particular thing at one company. Signing off on drawing changes when I worked at TWG. We printed out the drawings and a cover sheet with who needed to sign off. This was done mainly because some of the techs didn't have computers at their assembly stations so there was no way for them to sign off on something electronically.