On Apr 13, 2020, Russ Allbery wrote: > Dan Purgert <d...@djph.net> writes: > > > Who makes up the "younger" crowd? sub 30? sub 20? I mean, I personally > > was in my mid-20s when I first started using Linux (college), and I had > > otherwise only been introduced to the internet via AOL. > > Sub 30 was what I was thinking of. I'm only saying there's a bit of a > statistical tendency, not that this applies to everyone, obviously. But > when I look around at the broader development world, the majority of the > newer projects seem to not use email at all. Even when they do, it's not > where the most useful conversation happens.
Ah, guess I'm just old enough to miss that mark (although, I still do tend to fall into the "younger" part of the Linux crowd). The thing with the "newer" projects that I've seen (and maybe I'm just a curmudgeon trapped in a young person's body) is that they come off to me as the early dotcom "exactly like X, except on the internet!" stuff. > > Now, in a lot of cases the real conversation happens on GitHub, which > isn't exactly the same thing as a forum. But forums seem to play a large > role in some of the more vibrant communities (Rust, for instance). Haven't really gone there - I have noticed a lot of forums in regards to microcontrollers; but I tend to just leech off of them as I can't stand the whole "5th post on basically the same subject on the first page" garbage that (beginner) fora tend to cultivate. > [...] > Professionally, I can tell you that my younger colleagues tend to hate > email and far prefer other communication mechanisms, and that's not > because they're unaware of how email is used. The most commonly stated > reason is that email is full of noise and pointless messages that aren't > worth reading, compared to other approaches. That's just anecdotes, not > data, obviously, but it made me curious to understand what I might be > missing. (My past experience is that when younger colleagues get excited > about a new way of doing things, I should pay attention, because there are > probably things that I'm missing and that I will appreciate if I look into > them more deeply.) I think your younger colleagues are perhaps in a similar situation as me then -- the first place they've experienced *real* email volumes is at their first actual professional position; and they don't know how to cope with *everything* being placed into their inbox. I mean, I can't think of any other time before "work" wherein I was getting more than a handful of "important[1]" emails per day; and now I'm suddenly in a position where 30 people all have something "important[2]" to send me. It took me several years to finally get an organization system in place that made the volume not so distracting -- and the first indication my initial scheme wasn't as good as it could be was seeing an older colleague's inbox hierarchy (granted, I had a leg up on some other young people in that I had already been involved with mailing lists in the past -- my solution just wasn't as refined as it could have been, because, well work is outlook, and I was a thunderbird guy, so ... ) [1] As in "I need to do something with this" [2] As in "Probably not directly for me, but I should have a passing familiarity in case bossman asks" -- |_|O|_| |_|_|O| Github: https://github.com/dpurgert |O|O|O| PGP: 05CA 9A50 3F2E 1335 4DC5 4AEE 8E11 DDF3 1279 A281
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