Rant: “I wasn’t trained on how to do that.”

In my field, other than a few bits of VMWare, I wasn’t trained on a single thing I do or have ever done. Taught myself and figured it all out myself. I’ve never even had a mentor. No one. 99.999% of the things I know in IT has been and will continue to be all my own self-teaching.

However, the younger gens seem to have little to no troubleshooting or self-teaching skills. Learned helplessness, I guess. I’m not totally blaming them — it’s the environment they’ve been stewing in. Autodidacticism or in any way coloring outside the lines is not rewarded for them at all. And everyone responds to the incentives present, so it’s not entirely their fault they can’t figure out a damn thing nor teach themselves how to do something.

But it does make it difficult to give anyone under 35 or so IT projects as they need handholding every tiny little wee baby step. And that gets very tiresome.