Millennials finally realized that working for soulless corporations is a necessary evil for many of them and shouldn't rule their lives. Then they passed that news on to Gen Z. The Boomers who thought they had to put their entire lives into working 40 hours a week for shit wages in order to increase shareholder profits don't get it, especially when they were able to do things like buy houses on their salaries.
Yeah man my boomer dad gets a fucking pension! Blows my mind, except it doesn't because he was in a great union. I actually remember being on vacation once when they were doing contract negotiations and my dad calling his buddy each night to see if there was news. Kind of put a damper on the vacation but he only has that pension because he was in a union who was willing to strike.
What my boomer dad doesn't get is that so much of corporate enterprise, like even the thing they are ideally making or doing in the world, not just the working conditions or profit sharing, is not unquestionably good for us. He's an engineer from a time when it looked like technology would save the world. My zoomer kid feels conflicted just starting a hobby thinking of the consumption and waste it requires. If they could believe the companies they work for shared their values I think it would go a long way, but i don't see that happening very quickly.
And then came the mass layoffs, and everybody that came after that knew that long term loyalty was gone. Long term promises and careers didn't mean anything.
Then the budget for raises dried up suddenly, and the only way to get more wage was to change company. Any short term loyalty was gone, and putting in the hours for something that wouldn't come by the end of the year is now considered foolish. A career was a sequence of hops.
These are the kids that grew up seeing how this works and what it did to their parents. Now companies are shocked these kids don't want to play the same game.
These are the kids that grew up seeing how this works and what it did to their parents.
I was half-raised by my retired grandparents because my parents worked so hard. I have done everything I could to spend as much time with my daughter as possible. Which means not bothering with extra job shit.
right of passage
...
“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m,’” Foster said of her younger colleagues in an interview with The Guardian.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
In this case, I think the whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that giving sincere effort at work is so clearly a mug's game. It used to be that being disciplined about showing up and doing your job was difficult, but at least there was a reason to do it and develop the skill over time. Now? Unless you have some sort of unusual job where the management gives a shit about you, why would you?
Hard work gets rewarded with addition work. Im half assing for my own sanity. If I was paid enough to be comfortable things could be different.
I was late to work last Friday, intentionally, because my cat fell asleep in my lap while I was eating breakfast. That moment meant more to me than making sure I was there in time, no matter what it may have impacted. Working to live, not living to work, is the rallying cry upper management needs to come to terms with.
Every single generation has thought this about the younger generation. Every single one.
I think you’re right. My guess is that as companies get greedier and work offers fewer and fewer benefits, people are less and less willing to work as hard as their parents did. Employers that don’t understand this are either genuinely ignorant or just pretending to be ignorant.
I sincerely doubt the idea that people are working less. I worked at a college with a lot of boomers. Great people, but I was radically more efficient than any one of them. The woman who had my job before (college print shop), would complain about the work load. I only really worked until lunch and caught up on every single thing I needed to do. Watched YouTube and coded the rest of the day. Helps that I had a boss that didn't care as long as I was caught up.
Alas, the whole campus shut down last August.
I'm easily fooled into productivity with a median wage that adjusts with inflation and quantified growth goals.
Boomers would have expected their wages to go up above inflation. Not settle for keeping in line with it.
Right? Inflation raises are not raises. It’s saying you’re no better than last year.
Shit, mine don't even keep up with inflation and they never have. I'm effectively being paid less and less year over year, and companies wonder why job hopping is so prevalent. It's unreal!
What? Ridiculous. You want fair pay and non-arbitrary, non-shifting performance metrics? Cold day in h*ck when that happens!
It's this actually something that can meaningfully be said of Gen Z / millennials, or it's just "young people".
I ask because millennials are not just starting their careers, millennials are in their 30s and 40s. I've been in my career more than a decade and I'm a millennial.
I'm also less productive now than before because I have too much to meaningfully accomplish it all, so I say no to a bunch of work but still end up working on random things an executive asks for instead of deep focused work that could really push the company forward. But if you don't do what an exec wants you get fucked.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of millennials described themselves as unproductive.
"In a given week I maybe do fifteen minutes of real, actual work" - Peter Gibbons, 1999
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
I’m Gen X, and I recall similar complaints about us from the Silent and Boomer generation employees as we were coming up. So, it just seems like more of the same, with the added benefit of more awareness of what's happening.
Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
What the hell does this even mean. How is starting a career considered a "rite of passage" when the average American works 50-60 hours a week between 2 or more jobs? A career in a single field is straight up considered as unattainable as buying a house is by Millennials (46% of whom own a house, compared to the average of 65% for other generations). Plus Millennials have been in the workforce for multiple decades now. We're in our 30s and 40s. And nobody has "struggled" to adapt to the work week since the 40 hour week was created after unions fought for the right to 2 days off a week. Children are indoctrinated to this cycle in kindergarten! And it's a lie anyways with the modern culture of bosses demanding people be available to call during nights and weekends. The average corporate work week was closer to 47 hours even 10 years ago. Do they mean working at a single company for more than 3 years? Because that's often a loss in pay compared to changing companies.
We're off to a bad start before even hitting the paywall...
All I need them to understand is to pay me a fair wage and don't fucking talk to me on my days off and just let me do my job.
Yes, but also some fucking healthcare so I can get medication for ADD is necessary. I felt like a horrible human being for twenty five years for having a terrible work ethic. And then I went on meds and suddenly I'm productive and motivated. Made me realize I'm not a shitstain on the drawers of humanity, just someone who needs help regulating brain chemistry and is capable of great things when I get that help.
That gives me great empathy when people are crying about laziness. I suppose some folks are lazy, but I wonder how many of them wouldn't be if they could get help.
I'm actually off meds right now for various reasons (job change and related insurance fuckery) and I can't wait to be able to resume them because I'm a tenth of the person I can and want to be.
don't forget hiring more people when the workload increases instead of just dropping it on an already overburdened team and then get shocked when they just quit
Most of my career is showing how we could solve problems, being told not to because the morons above me don't comprehend abstract, being thrown under the bus, finding ways to do what is needed anyways, and only after the fact, after proof is shown that it was the correct thing to do, getting some meager acknowledgement that perhaps I was right amd know what I'm doing.
But it still never causes these idiots to actually trust me the next time. It doesn't seem to matter who is above me. If they are even slightly older than me, they don't ever trust people like me.
I see this same thing happen to a lot of my peers my age and younger as well. The high quality individuals suffer because the world is full of idiotic managers.
My pay is barely enough to get by on, so I’m only going to do the bare minimum to get by at work.
To summarize a long story, I (a millennial) put in a task request to a Gen Xer, including step by step instructions. I knew what to do, I just don't have access to do it.
Xer told me that was the wrong service, it's this other one, he can't find the settings in the Other Service. We went back and forth a few times, he repeated I was wrong, until finally he showed me a screen capture from Other Service that showed "managed by service 1" that proved I was right in the first place.
If he were willingly to accept I might know what I'm talking about and looked at the instructions, it would have been done in minutes instead of dragging it out over 11 days.
Obviously this is a hand picked anecdote, but yeah, bosses and non- boss elders definitely get in the way of productivity.
Research by economists should not be trusted in matters of employee well-being.
Call me crazy but the fact that no matter how hard a millennial or gen z person works: they still lack job security, most of their wages go in bills/rent, they often act as a carer in some capacity, and are generally not doing work related to their studies might also have something to do with it...
bosses aren’t doing much in return to help their young staffers adjust to corporate life
I can't recall when this was ever a thing. It has always been do or fail.
I've been laid off 5 times since I started what was my career over a decade ago. After the second time I learned to always keep a second or third source of income, which meant I never had a day off or a vacation for years. After the 4th time I gave up on corporate jobs but still took a position when a friend offered it to me. This time I will not go back, thankfully my side work of being a handy person landed me a job in the solar industry somehow and the pay is even better than my senior position at the last "career" job.
The survey of nearly 1,500 U.K. and U.S. office workers found that a quarter of employees self-reported low productivity in the workplace. More than a third of Gen Z employees reported low productivity, while 30% of Millennials described themselves as unproductive.
Couldn't this just mean gen x/boomers feel more productive? Doesn't sound like it really speaks to the output of the employees
Definitely.
I suspect many genx/boomers don't feel productive either - BS jobs don't discriminate - but they have probably seen enough layoffs to know when they need to appear busy - when a reporter asks is one of those times...
It's almost like nobody is able to give 100% at all times.
I've seen that when I first started decades ago. The department I was working on was filled with more senior staff and I was the only one in the department under 30.
There was very little in intentional teaching during that time. I'm not talking about training classes, but even basic things. It was just try your hardest and get comments back on your work. There were also cases where it was easier and faster for me to do certain tasks on the computer, but they weren't used to that idea.
And so you've got a lot of bad teachers in the workforce that have been doing their job forever. And because there aren't that many Gen X, there weren't that many in the middle ground to teach new staff.
And I feel like some elder millennials are taking the generational trauma of shitty mentoring and carrying it forward like a rite of passage.
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