I remember when I went to software training at an airforce field. I expected some slackers like the rest of my IT colleagues but as I was stumbling around the base I found a quonset hut full of old air force guys running to and from sweat pouring from their brow working on their battered aircraft trying to keep them in the air and I feared to interrupt their work to ask them where the building was…
wait, actually they were playing with model trains. With a track around the entire quonset hut. While that is emulatable in certain ways, dilgence towards one’s job is not amongst them.
And granted this anecdote doesn’t teach one anything about The Hierarchy, but it does talk to those who might claim a higher value for the work ethic for the miltary. If anything it teaches one that you can slack off as long as you get your job done at the end of the day.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to say anything about work ethic, only that in the military, I understand you’re trained to follow orders. It doesn’t always stick, to be sure, but if the workforce consists almost entirely of veterans, most people in it have at least received the training.
The sense that the employer no longer offers anyone job security, nor returns loyalty to the employee, does a lot to dissuade people from respecting the seniority structure. Add a world where things that came up 5 years ago are considered hopelessly outdated and the nagging feeling that that in 5 years the company itself may not exist or may have been merged into an entirely different corporate culture or even the technology itself may have been superceded, and you have people wanting to climb really fast to a high enough rank so it can be used as a credential when seeking the next job.
I assume you must be young since you apparently know everything. There is a reason that people think “kids these days”. It’s because it’s largely true. People don’t really change all that much as they get older. It’s that the younger people growing up are different. Not particulary better or worse. Just different. They have different shared experiences, cultural references and have grown up with different technologies. It’s the people who fail to grasp those differences who are left scratching their head wondering why “kids these days all seem lazy and shiftless”.
One example, by dad who is retired worked for the same Fortune 500 company his entire career. That’s what most of his generation did. He can’t figure out why I change jobs evert 1 to 4 years and assumes there must be something “wrong” with how I work. The only thing “wrong” is that I work in a highly competitive and dynamic field (technology and management consulting) that largely didn’t exist when he was my age. It’s not unusual to see people graduate, work a few years at Accenture, get “counselled out” and work at IBM, go get an MBA, work a couple years at an investment bank, quit and join a startup, joint another startup in a few months, go become a director at some other consulting firm, so on and so forth.
The AUDACITY of feeling ENTITLED to a personal life, family, friends and hobbies outside of work! THAT’S LIKE STEALING FROM THE COMPANY!
That sort of work style is bullshit. Generally it is inefficient and error prone and only really serves as a form of hazing or “paying your dues” in highly lucrative fields like investment banking, law, management consulting and Big-4 accounting. As in if you want to make “partner” in your lifetime, they expect you to work 100 hours a week and live out of a suitcase for 10-15 years. And in exchange you typically make a six figure salary that can get up into the millions.
Or you work in the high tech field where they work 24 hours a day because they are caught up in that Silicon Valley hacker nerd “we’re all going to be 28 year old billionares” cult mentality.
Maybe what a lot of kids are starting to realize is that there is no upside for working those hours. Assuming they can even find a decent job, they can be fired at any time for any reason. So instead of killing themselves for some stupid carrot they will never see anyway, they are content to live a more modest lifestyle in a more sustainable job?
I don’t automatically ascribe a higher work ethic just because someone was in the military. Maybe if they were a pilot of Navy SEAL or came out of West Point of some other highly competitive program. But a lot of people go into the military because they are screwups with few other options.
This more than anything. I turn 65 this year. I’m still putting in 40+ per week. Within the last five years, I’ve had three situations where “kids” half my age or less have gone home in a crisis situation and left me holding the bag to get the work done. Two of them were fired outright over it, the third was put on probation, counseled and fired about six months later for a separate but kinda similar screwup.
I’m in my 30s. Should I sit with the old farts or those damn kids?
The “seniority structure” is fading, too, as far as I can tell. In every job I’ve had since my college days, supervisors are more inclined to act like a buddy than a boss. Yes, they will hand out discipline, they’ll delegate work, they’ll hold your advancement in their hands… but a lot of them do so very awkwardly because they spend most of their time being friendly with everyone, and it’s hard to put the hard-ass hat on. The ones who are good at it manage to inspire and lead. The ones who are bad at it seem a little bipolar, cracking jokes with you one second and demanding you meet a deadline the next.
Maybe that in itself is a generational thing. Seems to me that for the most part, folks in their 40s today are doing much the same things as folks in their 20s. Same TV shows and movies, same internet memes, etc. That leads more to the “wow, we like the same stuff, let’s be friends” that can blur the lines of authority.
Speaking from the “kids” side on this one, because I feel like that’s the position I’m in: That is a huge, huge problem.
I’ve got a fantastic work ethic. I busted my ass at the hospital, doing more work than I should have because I cared about the patients and I had pride in my organization. But it kept going. It never stopped. Always more overtime. I was alternately yelled at for not handing more over to the incoming shift so I could leave on time (Because of overtime pay - $$), and for leaving things for the incoming shift (because they didn’t have the skills or time to do it and would send things out to the specialist lab - $$). Lose-lose situation. And instead of thanks or credit or a raise for my sustained effort, I got more and more shit from the senior (day shift) staff about the little things I’d forgotten to do while busting my ass. Like refilling the stapler I left empty, or getting a new box of pipettes from the store room.
Other employees were already aware of how the game is played, and some fought back by putting in a only a minimum of effort to stay employed. Those with too good a conscience to do so either quit for better things or stayed around and risked burnout. I left. It’s just not sustainable, not if you want enough time and energy left over to enjoy your spouse’s company in the evenings. If I’m going to have to give up that part of my life, there had better be a damn good payoff from my employer. But there wasn’t. So fuck it.
My B.Sc.Pharm. degree is now completely worthless, because not only can I not get a job as a pharmacist (primarily because it identifies me as Not A New Graduate), but because of it, I can’t get a job doing anything else either. Health care entities are only hiring people who have a Pharm.D. and preferably a residency or fellowship, which is pretty much something that’s started within the past 5 years, and nowadays, a lot of new graduates are doing them only because it’s the only way they can get a job, with the field being oversaturated for the first time in recorded history.
In addition, a new development is that many of them are graduating from college at age 24 or older with NO job experience of any kind!
Now, when I graduated, there were a lot of starry-eyed people who wanted to save the world, and getting an actual pharmacy job was a big time reality check, and unfortunately, many of them realized too late that it wasn’t for them but for various reasons (six-figure student loans being one of them nowadays), they’re kind of stuck.
About 10 years ago at my old job, we hired a new graduate who had a Pharm.D. degree, and even before he was licensed, he had the cojones to tell our oldest pharmacist, who graduated in 1966 and has since retired, that he didn’t know what he was talking about. :eek: Mr. 1966 is usually a pretty laid back guy, but he totally lit into Mr. Attitude.
Another thing that’s brand new, and quite disturbing? Many places are placing new graduates directly into management! That totally weirds me out.
You people must be hiring the wrong kind of kids. The ones we have dress at least as well as we do, and work at least as hard. If not harder. I started to work before the ability to log in from home, so when I was home I was home except for maybe reading a paper or report. Now I get email at all times of day and night. As for being entitled, when I started to work getting a job was pretty easy. Now kids are mostly running scared, coming out of a time of high unemployment.
Sure there are some lazy ones, but we had our share of hippie freaks too. I think I had it a lot easier.
The only reason I mentioned that there may be something to the “kids these days” thing is that I’ve had conversation with more than one college professor who say that they definitely see kids now expecting to excel simply by showing up. Or something like that. These are people who have been teaching for 20-40 years, depending on who I’m talking to, and they are befuddled as well. They talk about kids who expect the professor to turn their grade to an A simply because the kid was sick, or had family problems, or whatever. Or, even worse, they get calls from the kid’s parents, who also expect good grades when they’re not due.
I figure if these people who have more direct contact with college-age people are seeing a difference, maybe there’s some truth to it.
Me? I don’t have any direct contact with any college-age or 20-ish person who is a slacker. Are they all Type-As, living for their jobs? No, but neither was everyone 30 or 40 years ago. But in general they hold down jobs and support themselves, albeit it bit later than my generation did. I have nieces and nephews, for example, who lived with their parents up to age 24 or 25. I have no idea why they did that; at least one was working a full-time job making decent money and benefits and all that while he was living at home. He finally left when he bought a house and moved in with his girlfriend. Another was going to college, but hell, when my generation went to college, no way did we live with our parents. Being broke was better than that! Hmmm… looking back, maybe they ARE smarter than we were…
When I hear the words “sense of entitlement” I don’t think of kids, I think of people my age (57) and older. Those who use phrases like “I’ve paid my dues” to rationalize why they should get something for nothing. Sorry, nothing new under the sun. Old folks ares still bitching about the young.
The young people that work for me are all willing to put in a lot more effort than anyone my age. Maybe they are used to a little more flexibility in the workplace and maybe they expect a few freedoms (like personal phone calls) that some of us old folks didn’t have starting out. Why shouldn’t they have expectations? If I had a young employee who felt he didn’t need to come to work on time he wouldn’t be around for long, unlike the oldersters a few seats down who have paid their dues in some capacity that nobody except for them even remembers.
Recently I had a day off from work and encountered this all too common sight: three men, late 50s/early 60s I would say, sitting around a table, drinking their morning coffee and loudly bitching about the state of the nation. According to these bone-idle men, the problem with America is that kids are all lazy and unwilling to work. I wonder who they think makes and pays for their coffee and danish each morning.
Not directly on point, but I often wonder if we simply have more people than we need employees.
What is the trade-off - do you have fewer employees who you work to the bone? Or do you spread the work (and pay and benefits) among more individuals?
Unfortunately, it seems as though all too often the employers’ desire is to work fewer folk harder for more pay…
It is all good and fine for anyone - whatever their age - to proclaim themselves enlightened such that they need not be oppressed by “the man”! But unless you are a self employed entrepreneur - or independently wealthy, so long as “the man” is cutting the pay checks, he/she might well choose to give those checks to one of the several hundred other applicants for every job opening. If you think you ought to be able to dictate job conditions, you’d better be damned good at your job.
I’m sure it has always been thus, but I am astounded when I encounter young folk - in their teens and young 20s, who don’t seem to be interested in preparing themselves to compete in the job market. Hell, if nothing else makes me glad to be in my early 50s, it is the thought that I do not need to get started in a career in today’s market.
One thing I’ve encountered is much more casual attire. I tend to favor pretty casual dress - so long as the person is doing their job. But there is just something not quite right when - say - a young woman wears something quite revealing to work in a professional office setting. But perhaps that has always happened as well.
All through high school, nobody mentioned how to interview, network, or prepare for a career other than “What college do you want to go to?” My parents mentioned to dress nice and talk nice at interviews, and that was about it. When you got a job during school, it was usually whatever you could get that fit your schedule and paid bills. Only a very lucky few landed internships in my area.
During the final semester of college, my class was finally given a wakeup call about preparing for our future careers by the professors while also struggling under our heaviest courseload. It’s a wonder anything stuck. Up until then everything had been purely academic exercises. Thankfully, I got out of there prepared for my career, and obtained a job in my field. I would have preferred the subject of career preparedness to come up sooner. I’ve talked to others who obtained the same degree as me from other collegs, and their professors never mentioned how to prepare for their future careers. As such, none of them work in their chosen field.
I consider it an important part of the curriculum but it seems like most teachers just expect you to “get it” from somewhere once you’re shoved out the door. Very few put any importance on it until very late, if at all, so it stands to reason the kids wouldn’t ascribe importance to it either.
Yeah, wpuld be nice if the schools gave real world performance the emphasis given to self esteem…
But where are the parents in this equation? Why weren’t you doing some scut work when you were in high school - if for no purpose other than to impress upon you the importance of doing whatever it takes to not have to do such work for the rest of your life. Working fast food, mowing lawns, lifeguard - whatever, should impress such things as “right or wrong, the boss is the boss”, and the importance of getting out of bed and clocking in on time.
So - yeah, if parents aren’t instilling such things in their kids, they deserve a large portion of any blame. Hope they like their adult kids living with them!
I don’t know. I knew people who did this 40 years ago. I get lots of resumes from MIT students, and they are a lot more driven and smarter than we were 40 years ago. The class size is the same despite more people and more women applying. Even the Dean of Admissions said in a column that they were smarter than my class - but that we were more interesting.
Still, since more people are going to college I’m sure there are plenty who never would have made it 40 years ago, so that might account for this perception.
Frankly, that kind of lesson strikes me as the other side of the coin to “the customer is always right”: a way for bosses to abuse workers and expect loyalty while giving nothing in return.
Of course, if you believe that the only thing an employer owes employees is a paycheck, then sure, go ahead, but then you can’t reasonably complain that your employees aren’t giving 110%.
I’ve spoken to enough veteran HR employees to get the sense that it’s getting increasingly difficult to find kids who can even consistently make it to work on time.
