Companies are going to regret this in the next 5 years as baby boomers continue to retire and there's far fewer gen Z to replace them.
Many of my coworkers and peers are millennials, and I personally also know large swaths of gen Z folks who are extremely technical, more and more people are pushed into tech as a career choice these days - much more than they were in past generations. Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.
Companies like Ericsson could have an issue with their tech not being the same tech that younger generations are learning, but I doubt that'll be a major problem in practice as people are eager to learn and rewrite things with newer exciting tech.
If you're talking electrical and mechanical tech, I'm not so sure. If you're talking software, then yeah, the software industry has exploded over the past 20 years.
But I think that could be a problem rather than a boon: part of me wonders if non-software-engineering engineering is going to face huge problems in the future. Software salaries have really sucked the air out of the other industries, and software doesn't matter without amazing hardware to back it up.
(in my message above, "tech" refers to software tech, it's an overloaded term so I normally refer to electrical/mechanical engineering just as that)
It'd be a mistake to think baby boomers are irreplaceable by younger generations though (what OP suggested.) I believe we will see more technically proficient people in younger generations statistically due to more people in that group being exposed to tech. Not that they will be better necessarily.
Not many of my peers in school were learning tech, for example, but a good majority of those I talk to now say their kids are learning to go into tech. This is in Arizona, with random people, Uber drivers, etc. so not exactly a tech hub where it'd be very expected.
More people are going into tech as technology eats the world and people see that there are opportunities here. It is also becoming a required skill for a lot of trades such as working on cars, home automation systems, security systems, HVAC, appliance repair etc..
While more experienced people may be able to bring more value in many cases, often management does not see that and does the penny-wise, pound foolish thing. I have seen that happen a lot. Be it good, bad or indifferent, company owners are looking to make our skills more fungible so that they can drive those costs down. Also, hiring younger workers often translates into lower salaries. This is why no matter how irreplaceable people may feel they are, they are often not as irreplacable as they think they are.
Math? While gen Z is larger in absolute numbers, baby boomers were a much larger overall percentage of the population at the time they were born. Thus, there is still a large bump in the population pyramid that is retiring en mass.
> Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.
While I don't know what official statistics say, "being able to use an iPad" does not make one technically proficient. There have been a bunch of articles recently (some on the front page of HN) about how much of gen Z is completely unprepared for the technical workforce because they don't know how anything works under the covers. They don't know how to find files on a filesystem, they don't know how to debug computer issues, they don't know how to use spreadsheets, etc. They can of course learn to do this stuff, but the trend of dumbing down technology so it's a black box makes people less able to succeed technologically, not more.
I may have bitched as a kid to no end to figure out how to edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to run some game, but it did teach me skills about how to dig deeper when I hit a roadblock.
But then we’re on HN, where Backend and DevOps is probably what are considered technical pinnacles.
Some of us old-timers are very happy digging around in the basement levels while the web stack grows ever upward.
>definetely hardworking and motivated.
Disagree. My experience, generally speaking, has been that they do not pay attention to detail, and are not that smart. Even though they might be motivated to keep the job, and they do make great corporate drones, but they do not come anywhere near what it takes to make successful product.