What GenZs Think Of Software Engineering 

Here's what I want out of docs when looking at a new project: - Tell my what your tech stack is, and what each piece does (high level) - Show me the high-level structure - Tell me where the code's entry point is if it's not obvious. - Show me how I can get it running locally if possible. I can usually figure out the rest from there, but I *really* don't want to waste time figuring out those parts.

A survey featuring only 40ish people from around the world, from completely different cultures, with completely different backgrounds is quite frankely impossible for me to trust as a reprisentation of an entire generation of people. You would need thousands of respondents MINIMUM for me to even start to take this seriously

Archlinux is bussin fr fr no cap.

In my +20 years of working software engineering, I have had hit and miss with team leaders and CTOs, but with only one exception, middle management has been filled with utterly terrible toxic persons who have mastered the 48 laws of power. And they thoroughly enjoy flexing that power muscle.

I'm a Gen Z data platform engineer that's been building a large data lakehouse for the last 5 years. My largest frustration at my organization is the clear lack of requirements from product and management. I've had to design our entire architecture from scratch with no requirements after begging for them and getting nothing. Then after things are deployed, products comes and cries that it doesn't meet our customer expectations and we need to refactor. Having to redo work constantly from poor requirements makes me want to rip my hair out, and had driven me to extreme burnout to meet the deadlines. I always question if I'm in the right industry, everyone I've talked to makes it seem like this is just a continuous problem everywhere.

A nerd Is a nerd, regardless when they were born

damn, Prime out here making longer videos than most of the podcasts I listen to

Yeah we going to sleep with this sleep therapy video

2 hours???

Prime is a great teacher. Thanks for all that ya do. 🔥

"Work with purpose" probably means something like doing work not because someone decided you will, but rather because it is necessary. IMO it happens too often that someone makes stupid unreasonable decisions that they don't (or better yet can't) explain. It is really unfulfilling to do meaningless labor that cannot even be rationalized. So it's probably not that they want purpose as much as they want to avoid meaningless work.

Hey Prime! I'm one of those bootcamp schmucks with 20k in debt knife-fighting former Amazon employees for entry level positions and wanted to say thanks for your videos cheering me up and getting my mind back into coding! Thanks to you, I'm learning C and taking Harvard's CS50 course to actually know what a register is and already getting linker error migraines so I'm not just a useless web dev drone and actually having fun for the first time in months! Once I can appreciate C-wizardry I'm picking up GoLang and planning out some projects while sending out my ATS-optimized CV to anyone with a pulse and selling my soul on LinkedIn.

The paid dark mode 😂😂😂

My advice for young programmers is to look at their few year old code, and wonder at how far you moved on. Now imagine this happens your whole career. That should give you an estimate of how much you probably still don't know. Seeing your old code is the best way to humble yourself.

Lol at the comment about about conversations being about family, kids and houses. Sure some of the chats I have at work about about house/family/adulting things. But I've sat on deployment calls where we chatted about diablo, or had calls turn into chats on star wars movies vs comics, or just personally interesting tech topics.

My genuine self swears a lot and is basically a living, breathing meme and pop culture reference repository, with a few original jokes thrown in. There is no room for that at work.

"Try starting you only need to get that first 5 minutes" You're not wrong but also, at least for me, I absolutely need a side project in a entirely different style than my day job. When I was doing low level c++ for payment machines my side project was doing a graphics framework for lil game stuff in a very high level way in js. Now that my day job is js webapp tooling my side project is prog lang in ocaml to offset all the issues with shitty typing in ts and hopefully eventually startusing my own lang for side projects haha Making it something with a totally different vibe helps hobby projects not feel like doing more work despite being transferable skills

"It's always a younger engineer trying to push for better docs" aligns *perfectly* with my personal experience at work. Can't speak to how it is elsewhere though.

Good docs that are outdated are still orders of magnitude better than no documentation. With good outdated high-level implementation documents it instantly reveals *how* the previous engineer(s) where approaching the problem, and *what* their solution was. It also puts you halfway into the race instead of you having to spend time just searching for the starting-line. In my experience, engineers who only develop and never maintain *other* *peoples* *work* tend to have strong opinions about self-documenting code, and documentation being redundant.

I believe "work with purpose" is less about oneself and more about the work. They want to work on actual projects that bear fruit. GenZ may just hate wasting time.

We see Prime is Killing it as a professional streamer. 🔥Love seeing people succeed. Very nice ;)

I'm a 55 yo GenX'r who never misses a Primeagen drop. None of my GenX colleagues are tech RU-vid aware.

The amount of advice in this video that is immediately applicable to my current position in life is NUTS

I worked at Netflix for 2 years, 13 years ago. Same (lack) of introduction/orientation back then. Nice to know nothing changed ;-)

Regarding docs: i hate it when the only docs that exist are doxygen - because the doxygen docs are often lazy, minimal and generally less helpful than straight-up reading the source code directly. Also doxygen sucks because dark reader and etc struggle with it at best and usually do not work at because of bad styling choices.

You nail it every time, good takes

48:11 A lot of universities force you to use at least one functional programming language at this point (which makes sense, they are supposed to teach a broad amount of knowledge about the field at this is part of it).

“Gen alpha what are you 2004? You’re 14?” Incredible

7:00 “desire not to be underestimated” = “desire to be respected”

Probably one massive part of GenZ: Very few want to be The Primegen. Most don't want to live and breathe programming. They just want a job where they can do interesting stuff and then come home and do NOTHING like that. I personally like that too. I come home, I do not touch a damn terminal, no IDE, no script file, nothing. I keep home and work separated completely so I can switch and nothing bleeds into the other. I don't care about the "never work a day in your life" bull as that just leads to burnout on the thing you love.

1:16:55 I worked in a project in which the documentation was a required piece of the product. As in - client required to have documentation in order to integrate with the product properly. Having said that, the product was a piece in a workflow defined in a public spec. So out documentation was a mix of repeating parts of the spec with added sprinkles of implementation details, product-specific behaviors, and custom functions, that were not specified by the base document, but still useful.

"Born 2004? What are you? 14?" Oh no prime 😭

I love GenZ because they have more energy than me and will actually listen to me when I am trying to build their careers. They're more of a blank slate and easier to work with. I like working with them a lot. Well, the good ones.

On this 1:00:56 . I work at a company with a flat organizational hierarchy, and I agree it’s easier to talk to those who are more senior (sometimes it’s hard to even tell they’re senior because they’re younger) and engage in environments that typical organization hierarchies wouldn’t allow. This is one anecdote, but i believe it helps the company progress because engineers don’t shy away from learning opportunities because someone is senior.

I'm with you on the separation of back and front. They're separate thought paradigms that need a lingua franca like json or something else that does its job, but they don't seem to like trying to be the same thing.

When it comes to things like IDE settings ect. One thing I think more people understand is that you should understand WHY people like it that way, be it older or younger and then take the pieces you like about it and make it yours. That's what I did in welding, and it's what I've done in programming. You should never blindly just do what others have told you, but you should also never blindly not do it. Learn why they do it and then once you understand the purpose tweak it to fit your needs.

About your comment as around 44:50 about company loyalty, it's the introduction of the 401k in the '70s that killed company loyalty. It didn't change overnight, but that's what kicked off the change. Previously, people stayed at jobs for decades to receive a pension, but without pensions, it makes more sense to move around and collect raises. The few companies that still have pension plans still have employee loyalty.

I would wither and die if i could only program 40 hours a week. In my early 20s, id wither and die if you made me work 40 hours a week. Then i did. And i hated, and resented it for a long time. Then i discovered programming. Thought id be able to freelance 20 hours a week and play videogames in my off time. Then i fell in love with programming. I felt more joy in completing something cool than winning a round. So, slowly, i just became someone who loves to program at work, and at home. Im just doing what i love day and night. Thats all i see.

Please do more long ones like this. I love it. Would have listened/watched you read the entire article, even if the video ended up being 5+ hours. It's really nice as a podcast

I think that work with purpose is probably a misinterpretation from avoiding work against values. The values of the market lag quite a bit behind the values of the youth. You don't need to have complete purpose from your work, but if your values directly conflict with the type of work that is available it is demoralizing. The diversity of values people carry has been increasing in the information age. Before the information age college was typically the first opportunity to explore a value system that wasn't given to you, now it is a persistent activity of life.

I re-installed my IDE about a month ago. Had all my extensions installed except Codeium and since that installation is a bit longer I decided to leave it until after I finished writing the code I was working on. Next time I checked my watch was four hours later. It occurred to me that I hadn't been in the zone since a few weeks after getting a copilot installed. I decided to just forget about it.

I've also never related to the "evil manager" trope. Everyone on twitter apparently work for Sauron, toiling in the plains of Gorgoroth. I've only ever had good managers, and coworkers for that matter.

The purpose is gained by living your life in service to others. Leaving this place better than when you got here.

Put this on to go to sleep, thanks.

slam dunk, "social media plays more of a role in what is stereotype..."

Poor Görgli. I have heard Hungarian names mis pronounced so many times on youtube now, it's kinda hilarious every time, like not even close. I love it, english people please never change.

“People always talk trash about younger generations but this time is different” spoiler alert: it’s never different

i was just really wondering .. how healthy my relationship is with growth, hard work, achieving more, and being able to give more.. ive always been obsessed with it.. while i live in a medium sized city in a small Balkan country.. culture where LITTERALY 99% of people i know are coasting.. i had 2 years of coasting couse of mental health issues.. and i was constantly beating myself up.. it was burning me inside.. the talk we had about coasting helped me realise its Ok... ty Prime!

I am not a spring chicken anymore, that is something I NEED to remember for myself in some decades, thank you for such delicious expressions

A lot of older people in tech are like tech-debt, people-debt, to make any good change you first need to explain it to them, they are a roadblock to improvement as they fail to maintain an up to date understanding of the field and refuse to accept any change without it being explained to them first and them approving of it.

1:44:00 Something I've kept with me from a previous company is not letting an email chain, or Slack thread, go on for too long about a topic without an in-person. It's easier, I think, for everyone to communicate IRL vs talking in slack when it comes to a back and forth kind of topic and Zoom makes this possible in the remote world I work in.

I was tech leading a team for a year and then my manager told me it didn't help my career because half of the team I was leading was using a different technology than my specific career path. That was the first time (about 5 years into my 13 year career so far) that I felt like I was a number instead of a useful member of the team. I do COBOL, I will always work with people who do other technologies since we are essentially a data delivery language.

You need to make your own extensive survey prime.

Yeah, the lego sets were always the small ones, friend had the big pirate ship. I did have to Dick Tracy watch and Crossfire.

Been programming since 7 when I found a windows 95 laptop in the trash. I surprise the crap out of people when I'm the go-to for principle engineers for everything from scripting to discussing undefined behavior in c.

My ex employer used to promote people without adding to their salary in order to motivate them. Sometimes they promoted the lowest paid engineers and added some change to their salary to motivate them.

GenZ hide behind their phones and avoid phone calls as if it's going to kill them, directness my ass.

People who dont like or want to write docs are crazy, its like making a masterpiece painting and throwing it right in the garbage instead of on the wall

I'm proud of you, you're getting better at reading!

10:42 - And yet, Pharo's Seaside does it effortlessly.

6:00 Pirate Ship Generation. So true, 😭 but we had the greatest childhood, unironically.

About adopting new technology: one needs to think about the further. Imagine a system with several components (as they often are), written in 5 programming languages, 9 frameworks, 7 build systems. Some of them unsupported because the "cool new stuff" didn't get much adoption. Who's going to support that when the new guy pushing for new tech moved to a different project / company?

Never let your employer shape your career, you shape your career and then either shape your employer or where you're employed at. - thename!

I can understand wanting work with purpose without having it be part of your core identity. My job isn't just taking up 8 hours a day, it's the driving force behind all of my decisions from sleep, commuting, actual work time, more commuting, and prep for the next day. That's well over 16 hours a day for 5 days a week. I don't want to be doing that for a job that feels without purpose, but I also don't need the purpose to be something deep and meaningful. Making the codebase a little better than it was? That's purpose. Helping a colleague in some way? That's purpose. Sitting in a cubicle writing an app for a middle manager that's going to get scrapped as soon as something more shiny comes along? I'm out of there so fast the chair will still be spinning by the time the next drone comes along to replace me.

Why do you leave the first and last character when selecting text?

Cringe is the mind-killer. Cringe is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my Cringe. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the Cringe has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

1:08:52 I think the conclusion misrepresents the actual question. The question wasn’t a broad "What would cause you to quit your job?" but rather phrased it as "You quit your _current_ job. Why?" which elicits issues with the current job. The answers reflect the issues already covered in previous answers (meaningless work, unaligned with values, little challenges). On top all four answers are bundled and presented as "culture" at only 35% representation. That’s less than 9% per answer.

Coming from an European perspective, there's little reason to "play to win" as a software engineer here since management and execs rarely give a shit about how much we bring to the company. It's mostly sales, marketing and management that get rewarded through promotions, profit-share and comissions. but we just progression from junior, to mid, to senior, principal dev, get a shit ton more responsibilities added to our roles and maybe a hundred or two hundred euros or pounds added to our salaries each month,so it's not worth, unless you want to transition to being a project lead or a "SCRUM MASTER" which will literally be more pay for less work. I used to be very invested and go above and beyond in providing good solutions, but I've seen time and time again how someone who can bullshit their way through tasks and climb the corporate ladder by being chatty and friendly with people, glazing managers and execs will alway reap the rewards.... No one really cares about engineers. From management's perspective, we're the same as the "IT guy" who fixes the printer when it breaks.

"we got no food, we got no jobs, our pets heads are falling off!?"

On the contrary, the internet had made us way more used to saying our mind, I think ! But tact is useful, sometimes…

Prime: Enron didn't follow it's core values, therefore no companies have values Also Prime, seconds later: what do you mean managers are evil, you can't generalize such an individual thing

I think the "informal and open" and *especially* the "wants to be taken seriously" aren't really gen Z traits, but a young generation traits. Every generation in the past 50 years (probably way more than that) felt they were more open than the narrow-minded elders and struggled with being taken seriously by the much older authorities. Also, like Prime said - "work not a core identity" and "company values matter" seem to go directly against each other. Dunno if it's a quirk of that particular dataset or if it's a symptom of something else among gen Zs, like conflicting views and opinions in an ever more conflicting and complex world they grow up in. This would be interesting to follow up on in a decade to see what gen alpha turns out to be like.

"do not let the employer dictate what you're learning, you gotta learn outside of the job" some employer even secretly hated you to learn outside of job, because they always suspecting you had a side hustle some company only wanted people who obedient enough to follow rules, because everytime you gave them your ideas all they see is "this person trying to fuck around in my business" your employer are there for their company, not your future

It's funny. I see a lot of things attributed to one generation or the next when really it seems to be personalities. I know plenty of people who started their tech careers at an age younger then me who have stalled out because they don't learn anything new. I know plenty of people older than me who keep learning new things and keep progressing. I think it gets easier to fall into a rut when you are older but some of these traits are just the way some people are.

Prime pumping out a 2 hr video😲

I don't think older devs are out of touch with salary bands, I think younger developers are out of touch with basic economics. They look at enourmous companies on the left and right coast, and then expect some small company in suburban Iowa or Nebraska to pay the same magnitude of salaries.

I entered the office and 80% had white hair, didn't come into office again.

The survey size is so small though. I would not be surprised that it was linked at only one place which can swing the results massively. For example placing a survey on Facebook or TikTok will get you massively different age ranges. Placing a survey on stack-overflow or linked-in would probably see a bigger divide in people already working and self-employed/searching for work. It's fun, but surveys with such a small pool are difficult to take serious. Even for my graduation project I had to have a survey of 1000 people minimum.

Holy crap. I didn’t realize this was a 2hr long video when I clicked on it. The difference I (GenX) see between “work is my identity” and “I want my work to be meaningful” is I want my work to actually have an impact on the company and / or for the customers. I don’t want to just run reports, fix odd bugs here, tweak a search algorithm there and no one cares. I still have a life and purpose outside of work, but my job isn’t who I am. I just don’t want to spend 1/3 of my waking hours doing mindless, meaningless, soulless drudgery.

I dont practice repair outside my job because I want to be a programmer not a tech. So I'm practicing programming and devops outside my job to push me into a position anywhere in the dev chain. It doesn't feel fair, its not as fun as it seems for a lot of people but im doing it.

I'm only 11 minutes into the video... Gen X here and flexible schedule is very important to me: I prefer working at night.

I can relate to some of these and why workplace culture is at the top of my considerations when looking out for a job opportunity. I was down with covid and had to take sick leave but nonetheless I was still called up to 'support' the team from home as they had no one else who knew how to do it. It was a really horrible experience

I've spent a lot of time down the pub with the apprentices and my son; and I can tell you this article is fairly close to the truth. Gen-X can remember being younger; Gen Z cannot remember being older. Aside from the cultural references people are pretty much the same. My father was a software engineering manager - I heard him lamenting doing annual appraisals with the young'uns (back in the early 80s) and I can tell you that batch were just the same too.

+1 on never taking the counter offer. Counter offers are something poor leaders do to avoid short term inconvenience. They ARE working on replacing you now, just at their pace instead of yours.

"Now its time to turn the table, while the tables are turning on the turn-tables"

“Face to face conversation is obsolete.” Rusty Shackleford

Pretty soon these videos will rival Mauler's in length.

My reading of "work with purpose" is "work with intent" i.e. put effort into what you do, and care about doing your job well, hold yourself to a high standard. I don't think they're talking about purpose in the sense of finding a "purpose in life".

zoomer here, gotta make sure prime knows we here

I vibe with the whole GenZ can tell when a business is in trouble. A coworker of mine was surprised I basically knew my ass was grass a week before it happened and essentially every sign would indicate I shouldn’t have been.

Being somebody from lower GenZ, it seems to me that my peers who want to get into SWE are kinda overfocused on career Edit: OK. this article argues otherwise with only one example, lol

1:17:00 i can see why only the elderly would complain about younger ones pushing for better docs, the other way around doesn't happen. if you're new and make no docs, the old guys might be able to read it. if you're old and have 0 docs, only the old can read it.

As gen z, the post covid tech super bubble beginning to pop sucks. Getting laid off to save money sucks

Reggie Miller is what dirty south rappers used to call wacky tobaccy that was middle-of-the-road.

41:30 maybe the companies are worried about super-motivated employees turning into the opposite. Maybe they think it is a sign of being mentally out of balance. Maybe they think it is a little crazy and the employee could snap some day and go postal.

It takes time to measure an event when physics slaps programmers

I'm already satisfied with bf2042 and I saw their one to one comparisons. As a result, I don't see the need to play Delta Force, but I do hope DF is successful enough to be a top competitor with Battlefield. So that the quality of the game can increase.

I like the video right after Prime said "I'm not a spring chicken"

Actually I'm a milennial and I still have that $150 LEGO pirate ship.

It seems that the article's OP focused hard on only 35% of the survey respondents. This seems like a very narrow viewpoint based on the data collected.