The San Jose Mer­cury News on employ­ees under 30 in the work­place: ‘Hir­ing Gen Y may be haz­ardous to your business.’

The arti­cle is based on a sur­vey of IT man­agers, who are often the most con­ser­v­a­tive, change-resistant stake­hold­ers in any cor­po­ra­tion. So I don’t put much stock in its con­clu­sions, though I do agree that work­ers need to be edu­cated about the dan­gers asso­ci­ated with social networks.

I talked about this at Dig­i­tal Hol­ly­wood in Octo­ber; excerpt from my blog post:

We’ve seen a shift from closed, pro­pri­etary net­works like AOL toward open and semi-open net­works and plat­forms. Tra­di­tional norms of pri­vacy are falling away as the dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion, and the young in par­tic­u­lar, embrace the ethos of trans­parency, media shar­ing and, to some extent, GPS loca­tion aware­ness. And mass media con­tinue to give way to frag­mented niche media at an accel­er­at­ing pace.

Chris Tolles and I were not con­cerned, as another pan­elist was, about the media con­sump­tion habits of young peo­ple com­ing up in the work­force. As Chris said, when that 24-year-old office worker is stumped by a prob­lem, he’ll have a much larger sup­port net­work to draw upon, includ­ing old friends he went to high school or col­lege with.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.