Our two kids are millennials, college graduates who have excellent jobs. The youngest isn't too far off from qualifying for the upper end of the current "Zoomer" group (really? Zoomers?) I'll ask him what he thinks about them next time we talk. I'm sure he must know at least a few. He'll probably just laugh.
I don't know why it has to be a generational thing. He can't just say he hired some guys who turned out to be entitled little a-holes, so he fired them? He may as well have chalked his anecdotal experience up to their race or religion.
Exactly. That entire ethos that you need to give your kids things you never had has backfired, also parents feeling guilty about not being available leads to a lot of overcompensation has attributed to a lot of the entitlement.
I think every generation thinks the one after them is lazier or dumber than they were. I hired a few Gen Z this summer and they are good workers. They want more work than I can give them. I think every generation has its slackers and go getters. Gen X was originally put in to describe a generation that was lost and without the focus of generations before it.
Gen X were the golden age of hip hop We built this breh Rakim > Lil Peep or whatever those dudes are called now
I have managed a lot of people, from all age groups and from all parts of the world in super large companies. Here's the difference: The top 20% of your employees, regardless of age, do most of the work. That's just how it is. You're constantly juggling your best people to deliver without burning them out, while at the same time trying to get the 80% to achieve the most they can. The difference that I see, and this is conjecture from my own experience: In the younger generations, the lower half of the talent/productivity population THINKS they are as entitled and as valuable as that top 20%. Instead of keeping their mouths shut and learning and asking for help, or taking advice, or figuring out what to do to help, or at least not causing additional work or problems, they THINK they are valuable...or at least AS VALUABLE as the actual VALUABLE people, so they cause a bunch of extra work, or waste time, or complain about stuff. In the older generations (and I'm including millennials in this you old farts), the people that do the minimally viable work keep their heads down and their mouths shut. That's fine, whatever, not everybody is a superstar. They do their incremental value-add and go home. The other very difficult thing is that the younger Gen Z'ers that NEED help, often don't accept it. They often don't take criticism in any form, positive, negative, whatever. When offered advice on how to be more helpful, they don't want to hear it. Instead of being open minded about learning, they are actually quite the opposite. YES..the top 20% awesome people bring new ways of thinking and can revolutionize processes with great ideas, and the old people like me should be open to hearing it, but not everybody is revolutionizing stuff but they THINK they are. All in all, often very un-coachable. It's almost like "How dare this boomer think he can show me the right way to design this product, he didn't even have a cell phone until High School." Maybe because I've designed these applications and data models 100's of times, always successfully, and oh, I also know how to talk to the leadership to get it funded and the projects or products started, and how to run a large team to deliver it, and how to get the business users to buy in and use it without screwing it up, and I've trained dozens of new hires just like you to successfully do it, and how to get it supported when there is $0 in the budget...blah blah blah. Again, this is all conjecture and is a gross characterization. Every individual is different and brings different talents, but you get my drift.
Endless growth is a terrible idea. There is a correlation between economic growth and environmental destruction. We need balance. Here is a good article on the topic - https://psmag.com/magazine/fallacy-of-endless-growth
The kids who are growing up listening to Mr. Beast instead of Mr. Rogers are not learning any valuable life lessons.
