The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them
nytimes.comWhat makes this Gen Z behavior acceptable? Chiding the next-older generation for their culture is akin to making fun of the accent of your coworker who was born in India. It's just rude.
IMO it's a form of ageism, but given that most of these articles are written by 20-somethings at Buzzfeed and the Verge, there's zero incentive for that angle to be highlighted, as none of them have personal empathy for it.
Also rampant Dunning-Kruger effect among them.
Someones accent isn't actively harmful to others.
I'm regularly working with people in "gen z" the past couple of years, that's never been my experience. I've also seen a bunch of people from any type of "generation" behave the same way that is described in the article.
This was my thought as well.
Who wants to follow corporate culture that doesn't make sense or prioritize work over well-being? Not being exploited doesn't feel age related to me.
Yeah, I would say I’m surprised to see this on HN… but not these days.
We're really not.
Chuckles in Gen X...
Every time I check which generation I’m supposedly a member of, the random source I check gives a different answer. I definitely identify more with X than any other though.
(Assuming this is you) the boundary between Gen X and Millennials is a bit fuzzy, somewhere around the early 1980s (since inherently generations are marketing terms, sociology mostly deals with gray area). The closest experientially-oriented limits I've seen are that Millennials are old enough to remember 9/11 (born before ~1997) but young enough that the Great Recession hit either before they entered the workforce or during their very early career (before being ~1985, very early career being 1980).
Quietly biding our time until the Boomers die off and let us fix everything.
I think the core issue is the younger generation sees that the American Dream is bullshit and they aren't putting up with it anymore.
We're told from a young age that if you get educated and work hard you will be successful. You will be able to buy a house.
So, Gen Z gets a degree and is released into the hellscape that is the current state of American society. 40+ hour work weeks that are incredibly stressful, with bosses and companies who do not care about you at all. Rent, health care, child care, student loans - impossible to afford all these things on their low salaries, and when the business they work for is probably making as much profit in the history of the company, they see it as extremely unfair.
Vacation days? Time off? Barely any, deal with it. Getting called in on your day off? Part of the job.
And the worst part is all around them they hear boomers and older people tell them that this is normal. "Oh you're just weak and complaining. I had it worse in my day. You have an iPhone, Netflix, and Starbucks, you're living in luxury!"
Gen Z looks around and says - wait, is this really it? Is this what I've been preparing for my entire childhood? To just be miserable all week and have 2 measly days off that is barely enough time to do all the non-work stuff that needs doing like cleaning, bills, shopping? I see my coworkers 100x more than my family and friends. I get 2 weeks of vacation EVERY YEAR. I can barely afford to share an apartment let alone buy a house.
And I'm supposed to do this for 40 more years??? This is Life?
Fuck that
Oh, and to top it all off, they're inheriting the mess that is climate change.
Is the American Dream dead though? You can learn the basics of coding in a few months, score your first dev job, invest in your career and live a rather lovely rest of your life in some of the nicest parts of the country, working from either a cushy air-conditioned office with a big monitor, or from the comfort of your home wearing PJs. You don't even have to be that good, to be fair, the industry is infinitely hungry for people able to stitch a few paragraphs of javascript together while also having some basic fluency in English. You first job won't be at Google, but your second or third just might, and then you're practically set for life with that sort of luxury brand name on your resume.
Yeah, you won't have it easy in other industries that have plateaued or shrunk over the years due to technological shifts, but social mobility towards a very acceptable lifestyle is still plenty possible in the US.
Milennial not Gen-Z here: I see where you are coming I think your life experiences may be biasing you.
For example:
I have a computer science degree and I am far from bad off but I am one serious medical illness away from having to blow my retirement fund on medical bills or lose my house. And I pay $14k a year for that shitty medical insurance.
Coding for 20 years, 12 since my college degree... still no Google job.
And for the privilege of being in the top 10% I get to work 70+ hours a week and haven't taken a vacation where I haven't been called by my boss... ever... not even my honey moon.
And I'm lucky, most of the people I know don't own a house or have a retirement fund or safety net.
My father is in his 70s, has millions in savings but medical bills for his cancer will eat through almost all of that before he passes.
I'm pretty sure the American dream was not to rent for the rest of your life, work 60+ hours a week, retire at 80, never take vacation, be called by your boss all hours of the day, and leave nothing to your kids because your entire life savings got wiped out in your last 5 years of life by medical expenses.
And that is the life of an upper middle class family! 75% of the country has it worse.
And that is buying a house 7 years ago. No way in hell could I do that today.. my house is now "worth" $750k... I paid half that 7 years ago but my pay is barely higher than it was then so no way in hell I could afford it now. When I bought $750k would have been a literal mansion.
Real estate is definitely more of an issue for your generation. But the silver lining of Covid is the normalization of working remotely, so you can perhaps live some place cheap. Granted, if you were raised in California, say, that big house in Nebraska is going to be pretty miserable for you come winter time.
As for work? Work is work. That's why people look forward to retirement. In an old Calvin and Hobbes Calvin says "It isn't work if nobody is making you do it." On the other hand, just about anything becomes unpleasant if someone is making you do it and making you do it their way.
People keep saying that, but the American dream involved kids, with kids you want to be in a city at some point.
Has angst always been justification for unprofessionalism, or is this new?
I'm in-between, but honestly, young americans, even those with high-paying jobs, have it really hard.
When i told i was on a month-long vacation, the question was "oh, you're on sabbatical or in-bewteen jobs?". I just have 10 weeks a year plus two weeks of training of my choosing. It was a bit more than the bare minimum, but not having at least 7 weeks/year would be really harsh.
I think rather they were sold a myth of how easy life would be. For all this “hardship” people are swarming to come here and when they get here, want to stay.
There is also a problem with inversion of cost. “Things” were expensive my parents day - TV, etc. Property was cheaper, so a boomer sees an iPhone and says a person is rich, but looks at his own 3k sq ft house and thinks “nothing special”.
Been said before and should be obvious, but as a Gen Z’er, we’re not all like this.
That's been my experience as well as a manager of Zers. Yes, there are a few who have drunk the wokeism koolaid and crave the attention they get for the "cause du jour". But most, especially in dev, just want to focus on their careers and on solving interesting problems, and they are happy to leave divisive political activism at the door, or at the moment of selecting which company's mission to join.
Honestly a lot of this sounds a lot like having normal healthy boundaries at work.
It was boomers vs millenials, because well boomers. But they are trying to switch the conversation to millenials vs zoomers. But the boomers ARE in charge of these lies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDJvj4i4Oi0
I have an opposite impression of the work divide between millennials and Gen X (assuming by "boomers" you meant Gen X; the word seems to have stretched to encompass everybody before the millennials.) To me as an Xer, the millennials seemed very hardworking, incredibly polished for their age, always put together, plagued with anxiety about how perfect they needed to be, and confused that the Gen-Xers above them in the org chart weren't always perfectly put together, didn't always have a perfect outfit, took the occasional Friday off so they could have a long weekend, etc.
So this article fits with my experience of the millennials being neurotically driven to be perfect and hit every corporate expectation, and finding themselves anxious around a generation that is more self-assured and blasé towards work. The big difference is that now the other, less driven generation is younger and more current than they are.
The article is behind a paywall. What it argues instead of the two traditional mottos: "younger people don't have a family and work all nighters and weekends" and "if you don't work your ass off your boss will exchange you for somebody cheaper"?
You can get past nearly all of the paywall blog / news sites by blocking their cookies.
you can just curl the article to get past the paywall
As someone right in between Millennials and Zoomers ('92), I find myself really empathizing more with gen Z. I really appreciate that our weird puritan-work-ethic-meets-corporate-capitalism economy has finally produced a generation that is just fucking done with how out of control it's gotten.
People are finally realizing that "the hustle" is a fucking scam if you don't have enough equity in your "hustle" that you're on its Board or in the C-suite. Which is almost nobody at this point. We're finally rejecting this glorification of labor at the expense of ourselves, our society, our environment, etc.
I also appreciate the “f the hustle” mentality but it seems to come from a place of self entitlement, a lot of “and what about me?” less “what about us?”
There is no "us" when we have this level of income inequality and workers are treated like dirt. You have to be a fool now to think your company actually cares about you.
The "us" is the working class. I think the implication is they don't really care about their fellow workers, but for the power of union.
I see the same "what about us?" being asked. The only difference is "coworkers and company" have been removed from the "us" group.