I had to laugh this morning when I was asked on a new website I was testing for a company if I wanted to take a “virtual tour” first. I decided to humor myself and take the tour anyway. I got exactly what I expected; a bland click-by-click navigation of someone *else* browsing around the site. For those who may have a web design and user interface (UI) background like myself, please take note. I’m not saying virtual tours aren’t a valuable tool or can’t be useful. What I am saying, however, is that if your site isn’t intuitive enough to allow people to get there and just know how to use it by encorporating generally accepted web design standards and clearly directed, actionable items…creating a virtual tour isn’t your biggest problem.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with Gen-X and Millennial employees, the answer is – everything. It points back to senior-to-middle management not listening to the voice of those already within their workforce. These young minds have never known a day without technology, and they understand it very well. If you want to know how your website should look and feel, what actions it should offer or how the UI interacts with the visitor – ask them. They want to tell you. They’re practically begging to give you the answers you’re willing to pay outside consultants too much money for. All you have to do it ask them. You have the business and project management experience to know how their great ideas can be implemented. So don’t keep them out in the cold. Invite them in, engage with them and most importantly…listen to them.

Don't Quit

Even more so than Generation X, Generation Y has a tendency to want to move on to something new when what they’re working on gets boring or too challenging. Maybe it’s because of XBox and Nintendo shortening their attention span. Maybe it’s their parents’ doing. But somehow this permeates their lives. They have a desire to be more constantly engaged. That’s my politically correct way of saying ADD – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Shorter, more intense bursts of productivity can be a great thing if used properly as with Agile Development. The down side is if managers don’t understand this and when their emplyee’s attention isn’t peaked anymore, they’re more apt to just move on. In a work environment this, at best, means they becme disinterested and disengage. The worst case scenario is – they quit.

Quitting a job can be done with professionalism and grace or it can be done the wrong way. Recently  I was working a Millennial on a web project. He was a very bright guy in his early twenties who absolutely lived for cutting edge technology. Though a novice coder myself, I knew what to look for when perusing his css and jquery and his stuff was impressive. However, the site he had designed and implemented that my team now owned was not maintainable because we had no one else on staff that could support and maintain the site. Though he had the ability to use some amazing code, he lacked the experience and foresight to make the whole business case before implementing.

He recently  moved on to another project.  He is a talented web designer and had some recent “success” with a couple of web projects like the one I took over. He was given the flexibility he wanted in order to tap into his creative side and produced some good work. However, on his new project he wasn’t given as much flexibility by the project manager. In fact, the project manager wanted him to “get in line” more with the rest of the contributors to the project. This was a challenge for him because he “knew he was a better programmer than the others”. But the truth about it is that he is equally as talented as them, but has strengths in certain areas. He learned this first hand in a SCRUM meeting when he suggested what he thought was the best way to approach the project. His inexperience in the businessess environment came through and he was clearly in over his head. He got frustrated because the rest of the team couldn’t see it his way and quit on the spot.

If you’re going to quit a job, I recommend not doing it this way. This young and talented programmer wasted an opportunity to grow. Maybe he was right in his suggestion to build a system that was quick to produce but difficult and expensive to maintain? We may not know now because he didn’t stick around plead his case. But maybe he missed a great opportunity to learn the larger picture and how his cutting-edge code, though at first glance may be prohibitive, couldn in the long run have really been an asset to the company.

To any Millennial (or really anyone) I recommend never quitting in the heat of the moment. The quickest route to burning a bridge you really don’t want to burn is to storm out while you’re angry. It never looks good on a resume, it’s not best for you as a paycheck seeking individual and it isn’t  fair to the company that’s been providing you those paychecks. I would also suggest being patient to see how things play out. Even in the worst situation, you can learn from sticking with it. This isn’t the most enjoyable route, but I’ve found that even working on projects that are doomed to fail can be edifying. Maybe all you learn is how not to run a project. But even that is called “experience”. And the more experience you have, the better you’ll be at what you do.