Gen Y versus Gen X 3761

Kamal R. Prasad

How typical of Hindustani to surf the web instead of working. If I were in charge of a company, I'd install "spy" software that logged all Web activity. Anyone caught going to a non-work-related webpage would be fired with no severance benefits. All emails would potentially be read.

If you had speakers on your computer, the webpages might have sounds to distract people who were actually working. Anyone walking by your monitors might be offended by the webpages. The Hindustani who sat near me spent most of their time surfing the web, usually Hindi sites with pictures of Hindustani women. They also checked their stocks at least once an hour, often doing detailed research on mutual fund performance.

When the Hindustani weren't surfing the web, they'd be on the phone, usually speaking in Hindi. Not just to their spouse, but on long distance calls to friends. If I were in charge, I'd fire anyone who made a personal long-distance call on a company phone. In addition, while speaking in Hindi, they could be giving away company secrets or plotting person attacks.

If Kamal is claiming he's so productive, he did 8 hours of work in only 3-4 hours, and couldn't proceed to do any more work because his coding needed to be synchronized with other people's tasks, then his lack of work outside of the 3-4 hours could be considered OK if he was paid a salary and not by the hour. When paid by the job or by salary, people who work hard should be rewarded, and slower people should be punished by having to work extra hours to catch up.

Most of the Hindustani I've encountered in the workplace rarely worked even 3 or 4 hours. They typically show up late, spend a lot of time goofing off (schmoozing with people, brewing weird tea, smoke breaks, etc), go to lunch early, get back from lunch late, and leave the office early.

I remember one Hindustani took several months to fix a simple VB bug that displayed the same error message box twice instead of once.

Some slackers cheated by giving long estimates on how long to complete a task. For example, on a task that should take 2 days, they said it would take 2 weeks. They'd finish in 4 or 5 days, then goof off the rest of the 2 weeks. When I asked why they weren't working, they said they had the two weeks before they had to do anything. Hindustani aren't the only slackers. One female American programmer (whose coding style was unmaintainable and she broke a lot of existing code) was notorious for overestimating the times for simple bugs. She said it would take 5 hours when in reality it was fixable within one hour. She spent the rest of the 5 hours in a break room reading the newspaper. And her fix usually broke several other parts of the program.

The Generation X label is flawed. You can't paint the entire generation. True, the vast majority of Gen-X MEN are disenfranchised and unhappy, unable to get a job no matter how hard they try and how many job skills they learned. It makes sense for the generation to be depressed, growing up under the threat of nuclear winter, with huge economic recessions caused by Reagan and Bush, the threat of AIDS, and other nightmares. However, the white women in that age range are overwhelmingly positive, optimistic about the future, because socialist American society hands white women cushy overpaid jobs and gives them huge taxpayer-funded handouts such as breastle IX scholarships and paid maternity leave and welfare checks and taxpayer-funded partial-birth ends on demand. Nonwhites are always subject to discrimination in America, so the generation "doesn't matter" (note that I don't consider upper caste Hindus nonwhite; they consider themselves white and the government gives them preferential treatment, all the benefits of living in the USA with none of the responsibilities).

The specific Gen-X labels mostly apply to people in Seattle: no hygiene, listening to terrible music, white suburban punks wearing flannel shirts and other working-clbutt outfits, moping around in upscale coffeeshops, harboring suicidal tendencies. I suppose Seattle is still the same way now because Bill Gates fired almost all American workers in favor of Hindustani, and Boeing moved most of their area jobs away.

The positive claims about younger generations being hard-working and moral are a bunch of BS. When they graduate college and see the ugly truth about the American economy, they'll be as cynical as Gen X.