I’ve noticed that my expectations as a professor are sometimes quite different from those of my postdocs. This is not about research experience, etc., and not about culture, but rather basic work matters; things that go for me without saying. At first, I thought it was just me, but apparently colleagues have encountered similar issues as well.

Therefore I’m starting to wonder whether this is perhaps due to generational differences between (professors) and (postdocs).

So, question for other professors: Do you have similar experiences? And if yes, any good approaches for dealing with it?

@true_mxp What do you mean, do you have any examples of these expectations?

@tschfflr Hmm, it’s obviously hard to give concrete examples… One issue is the “works for me” attitude. Example:

Me (after having finally found a slot for a short meeting with a millenial): When you’ve got long meetings in the morning and the afternoon, you’ve got to put them in the team calender.

Millenial: Why? We only needed two e-mails to find a slot for a meeting.

@true_mxp @tschfflr I'm a millennial professor and I put everything in the shared calendar! :)

@fpianz @true_mxp I think this kind of thing may be partly due to age, but mostly due to position: a grad student’s or postdoc’s calendar is in no way comparable to a prof’s calendar. (Scheduling and meetings are some of the true evils of today’s academia, imo)

@tschfflr @fpianz Maybe this was a bad example… It’s not about calendar usage!

I only picked this example because it’s relatively harmless, and it seems (to me) to illustrate an attitude that I’ve encountered in other cases as well. To put it a little bit more bluntly, it seems to me that the issue isn’t *not knowing* that the prof’s calendar is maybe different from your own, but *not caring*.

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