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You’ve heard it a million times over and you won’t stop hearing it until you’re the one saying it about your kids — the younger generation is “entitled” and “lazy.” No matter how much we try to avoid it, proving yourself in the workplace is going to be an uphill battle until all those old fogies retire and let us take the reins.
Well, The Guardian spelled out the five most common workplace stereotypes about people born between 1980 and 1994, so pretty much everyone that’s out of undergrad and in the workforce. And honestly? The entire study made us all sound like pieces of shit.
1. Millennials set the bar too high because of a sense of entitlement.
“The millennials I know are not willing to settle for mediocre careers – they’re working hard to find work that they are passionate about, even if it means doing a boring low-paid job on the side,” said Sofia Niazi, 29, over a coffee in a small bookshop near Waterloo, London.
I mean, I think it’s more that people literally can’t afford to take jobs that can’t cover their rent, student loans, $125 iPhone bills, $4.50 daily coffees, $9 nightly bottles of wine, and all the Postmates delivery fees we’ve been stacking up. I mean, what’re we supposed to do? Live in poverty until we work our way up the corporate ladder like our parents did? Nah, I’m good.
2. Millennials are lazy.
When Joel Stein, an American journalist and a member of Gen X, penned his “Me Me Me Generation” column in Time magazine, he caused a stir. He wrote: “Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance.”
Uh, hey Jole Stein, maybe you should take your head out of your ass, bro. Last time I checked, we weren’t sitting there at Track & Field Day giving participation ribbons to ourselves. That’s on you, hombre. I knew I sucked at the long toss but people like you kept telling me how great I was. Am I overly confident in most things I do in life? Yeah, of course, I am. But that’s because turds like you were too big of wimps to deal with me pouting when I didn’t podium in the high jump.
3. Millennials work to live rather than live to work.
As a student, Ann-Victoire Meillant co-wrote From Millennials with Love, a collection of experiences of her peers in the workplace. “What we found in our research and from contributors is that we didn’t like the phrase work/life balance, but instead were talking about work/life integration.”
Uh, yeah. You know why all these old motherfuckers are repping work-life balance? Because when they were pieces of shit interns like us, they didn’t have an iPhone that they were constantly strapped to when they could be called into the office at any given time of night.
But nope, not us. At the drop of a hat, we’re Uber’ing back to the office because of a casual text or email sent after-hours. Y’all were just sitting in dark bars like you were characters in Mad Men pretending to be tough guys while you worked exactly forty hours a week and nothing more.
4. Millennials are compulsive job-hoppers.
Just as millennials enter the workforce in greater numbers, there is a stack of literature characterising them as job-hopping, needy, deluded narcissists. Books such as Generation Me by Jean Twenge and Not Everyone Gets a Trophy by Bruce Tulgan suggest that millennials are the worst possible employees.
Sure, okay, we’ll take the blame for everything, won’t we? Get out of here with that “worst possible employee” garbage. What’re we supposed to do, stay at a company for 45 years and collect that gold watch at our retirement party? That sounds miserable. Variety is the spice of life which is why I mix in some salads and burrito bowls whenever I head to Chipotle for dinner.
5. Millennials have little time for experienced colleagues.
Other things millennials value in the workplace are “reverse mentoring” – the opportunity to teach skills to older colleagues as well as learn from them – and more time spent discussing new ways of working, mentoring and developing leadership skills.
Why do I get the feeling that this “reverse mentoring” is really just us telling the old people how to use their computers and set up their personal emails on their iPhones so they can forward us right-wing political chain emails that we’ll immediately delete? You don’t see me asking anyone how to send faxes, do you?
Get out of my face, Guardian. .
[via The Guardian]
Image via Shutterstock
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Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
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The only way to get promotions/raises today is to job hop…but yeah, let’s fault young people for striving for more.
Baby Boomers see job hopping as selfish and disloyal, because when they were young a company scooped them up right after high school even though they had no skills. They’re trained on the job and got promoted fairly regularly. We come in very skilled in our areas and, like you said, can only get promoted by job hopping or threatening to job hop. I refuse to be loyal to a company if they don’t treat me well.
If I move up, and move jobs, I have no problem defending that move. Why did you leave after 1 year? Um, title, office, and 26%. Next question.
I told my boss after I gave my two weeks notice that it was entirely based off of pay and title. There was a long pause, then he finally said, “Well, I can’t fault you for doing shit that I did at your age.”
I didn’t like him much, but I at least respected that he knew how the game is played nowadays.
I’d rather job hop and be criticized for it, than stay at a job I want to leave, just to not seem “rude”. Plus, the current job market is shifting to where we can make these kinds of decisions and companies aren’t bent out of shape that you leave for more money elsewhere. Sorry my life’s highest calling isn’t pushing pencils at a dead-end job, or working on an assembly line at Ford for 50 years.
Hey….Fuck you
I am thankful to be in an industry where you are expected to quit or get laid off every 3 years because I start to get a serious itch to GTFO around year 2
Damn kids.
Apparently not wanting to settle for a mediocre career and setting the bar high for ourselves makes us terrible people now. That’s a new one.
Other than the Greatest Generation, no generation before ours has been asked to do more for less. These older folks like to tell us all we do is complain, but all they do is literally complain about us. The Guardian can go fuck itself.
Tom Brokaw was a punk
The Greatest Generation dropped everything they were doing to save the world. They’re okay in my book.
Yeah but their kids are all coddled hippies.
I think this is just another example of the previous generation realizing how obscure they are becoming. Trash the next generation (the one they raised) so you can seem relevant to society.
I’m not sure why job hopping is a bad thing. Yeah you probably shouldn’t switch jobs more than once every two years or so, but if doing so gets you a pay raise, then why not? I switched jobs last year and got a 30% bump. It would’ve taken me at least four more years to get the same pay increase at my old job. If you recruit and interview well, more power to you.
Well thanks to the generations above us, we will have no social security and we will never retire. And those bastards are going to live FOREVER. So fuck yeah I’m gonna switch up my jobs. If 15-20% of my paycheck is going to support your wrinkled ass until I’m too old to enjoy it myself, I’m sure as shit not gonna be bored with my job.
It really is the Silent Generation’s fault we are in this at all. If you are too stupid to save money for retirement over the course of 40 years, you shouldn’t be given a bunch of money just because you are old. It is the ultimate participation trophy.
They profited as a result of their fathers and older brothers who fought in WWII. They did none of the work and reaped all of the rewards. And they call US lazy and entitled.
The Silent Generation was the generation before the Baby Boomers, who actually implemented Social Security. But I agree, the people complaining now have no right to it.
Yeah and we can drink your old asses under the table at happy hour.
Here it goes: fuck off Gen-X and Boomers. There will continue to be a massive shift in the model of staffing/hiring for corporations. Those that don’t keep up get eaten. Millennials have made it abundantly clear our expectations for the workplace. Granted, there will be some give and take, but to assume that the largest group in the workforce is simply going to continue to bend over and take it raw dog is unconscionable. Blaming someone for job-hopping to improve their career then, but in the breath before that call us lazy is a direct contradiction to your previous point. Screw it, don’t hire us and in 20 years when your business is in the dumps, please don’t call us.
Whew…that really got me going. I’m good now guys.
So we are a lazy, entitled generation that sets high goals and works extra hard to achieve them? Does nobody notice the inconsistency there?
Schrodinger’s Millenial: Simultaneously too lazy to go out and get a job, yet so entitled as to demand fulfillment from work.
You wanna complain about employee loyalty? That’s a two-way street. My family learned that the hard way when my mother, one time saleswoman of the year for a major pharma company got laid off after 23 years when an acquisition took place. From that moment on I learned to look out for myself and my family because corporate America sure as hell won’t.
the loyalty expectation is a one-way street
So millennials work hard because we’re entitled but we’re lazy too? Got it.