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 IT guy it hurts that a person with such outdated skills gets to have a job in 2024.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 IT guy it hurts that a person with such outdated skills gets to have a job in 2024.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.
In reply to z31maniac :
I'm definitely not trying to derail this one, but then I seem to have a knack for doing that accidentally...
On that note, the fact that this guy still has a job already serves as strong proof that he'll never change, his role has proven to be somehow immune or resistant to the strongest forces that should cause him to stop working like it's 1929 (it sounds like he basically only uses the computer as a suped-up typewriter). You're not going to change him, so you can either put on a paperboy hat, grow an elaborate mustache and join him in 1929, or get out from under him somehow.
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.
:)
GameboyRMH said:working like it's 1929 (it sounds like he basically only uses the computer as a suped-up typewriter).
Well, if it were truly 1929 (or even the early 60s!) he'd have a typing pool to do that for him...
In reply to GameboyRMH :
On that note, the fact that this guy still has a job already serves as strong proof that he'll never change, his role has proven to be somehow immune or resistant to the strongest forces that should cause him to stop working like it's 1929 (it sounds like he basically only uses the computer as a suped-up typewriter). You're not going to change him, so you can either put on a paperboy hat, grow an elaborate mustache and join him in 1929, or get out from under him somehow.
The guy likely still has a job because he is good at what he does and the way he has been doing things has worked for him so far. He's likely outlived many "great productivity tools" and marketing ideas that came and went. In my experience- many of those old guys still have the ability to focus on what is really important, while many of the younger, more tech savvy guys tend to get so caught up in the features that they forget about the benefits.
Forgot to add my advice for the OP- maybe try introducing him to one thing at once. Pick whatever tool that he isn't using that has the most benefit for the least time invested on learning, and sell him on what is in it for him and offer to help him learn it. You would likely be successful and open the door to the next tool that he isn't using. Be sure to look at it from his point of view, so that you choose something with obvious benefits for him. I'd do something like "Here's the printout for the report that you asked for. I also added a copy to our shared file, that way it's searchable and you can access it from anywhere. If you have 5 minutes, I can show you how to access the shared file and demonstrate some of the time saving features."
Boss wants face-to-face.
When I was with an industrial distributor we had large companies we spent $500,000/year with and had no idea who their sales guy was. Never bothered to come see us. ($500,000 is a lot of clamps and hose fittings). We'd joke - who is our guy? We're not important enough......
I'm now with a hose manufacturer and we see our large customers 4-5x a year. We make sure we are available and that they know who to call with problems or opportunities.
Old boss guy isn't totally off base here.
Datsun240ZGuy said:Boss wants face-to-face.
When I was with an industrial distributor we had large companies we spent $500,000/year with and had no idea who their sales guy was. Never bothered to come see us. ($500,000 is a lot of clamps and hose fittings). We'd joke - who is our guy? We're not important enough......
I'm now with a hose manufacturer and we see our large customers 4-5x a year. We make sure we are available and that they know who to call with problems or opportunities.
Old boss guy isn't totally off base here.
This is why i'm of two minds about this. pres589 (djronnebaum) isn't wrong in saying to get ready for some issues and possibly needing to leave; but in the same breath, it's a known fact now that writing down and having physical copies of things (even when they're typed and printed!) leads to better memory retention than normal- same with face to face meetings and quick discussions, which is basically what I do constantly in nursing with my doctors. "No facet of marketing is effective" at first sounds like a guy yearning for the golden era of door-to-door sales, except we're now in an era of adblockers being basically hour-one installs on most devices and modern research showing that marketing has consistently decreased in utility with every generation, now nearly worthless with Gen Z/Alpha/whatever the hell.
It's vexing.
EDIT: Oh thats an idea- see if you can find his intentions with you being more "personal" with your sales- I don't know what you sell, but maybe he also wants you to act as a troubleshooter in case of issues with product? That's real common in medicine, like if you have a replacement joint there was likely a company rep in the surgical ward when it was going in you.
OP works remote most of the time. How's he supposed to transfer this in-writing communication? Passenger pigeon? Western Union isn't doing telegrams anymore.
pres589 (djronnebaum) said:OP works remote most of the time. How's he supposed to transfer this in-writing communication? Passenger pigeon? Western Union isn't doing telegrams anymore.
Just trying to think positively and outside of the box... Would a daily 'check-in' conference call with said boss be able to alleviate any of the paper train into his hands? I've always found verbal communication>digital communication>paper communication... at least in my field of work. Maybe he just feels this innate need to be kept in the loop with remote employees, and maybe daily calls are a way to sort of meet in the middle?
I'm just thinking out loud honestly. The idea of paper printing emails, only to either mail or deliver them to the office, from a remote employee to a not-remote employee sort of makes my brain twitch.
Seems like a fax machine might be useful, if you can still find them.
pres589 (djronnebaum) said:OP works remote most of the time. How's he supposed to transfer this in-writing communication?
That's a good question to ask the old boss man. What does he suggest?
Datsun240ZGuy said:pres589 (djronnebaum) said:OP works remote most of the time. How's he supposed to transfer this in-writing communication?
That's a good question to ask the old boss man. What does he suggest?
I bet, and I could be wrong, the the manager in question says something like "well in my day we were always in the office unless we were at the customer's place of business" and then starts rambling about how he helped write "Ever Onward" for IBM employees to sing at company events.
In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :
Yeah, be careful how you word it as he might want you in the office more.
All sales jobs prefer you live on the road - there's an issue with office sticky carpets and salespeople......
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