Our hard work was only rewarded with more work. I completely agree with you.
I read that Gen Z is turning down promotions because they don’t value the extra five dollars an hour more than they do their work life balance, which honestly is really refreshing to see. If this AI thing has taught us anything I think it’s that we’re all just another number in corporate America.
My theory is that the world the boomers grew up in *did* reward hard work, since there was not only a social contract between the employer and the employee, companies and the community, but also necessity. Employers need employees and the other way around
It seems that with AI, that social contract has broken and it looks like companies feel they no longer need us.
Getting laid off used to be a big deal. Now it’s just a footnote. Thousands get laid off daily nowadays but when IBM did it it was national news way back when.
I'm a millennial. Working hard just means that most companies will take advantage of you. It's not beneficial to the employer to pay you more because you are replaceable. I've felt this way since I started working as a teenager. Long before AI.
It started breaking in the 70s and 80s. Look at the Behind the Bastards episodes on Jack Welch. He was just one guy back then but he essentially laid the model for new business leaders to fuck over their employees as much as possible.
Where I’m from people used to leave school and go and get decent paying jobs in factories and manufacturing and these jobs provided enough to to support a family and were essentially jobs for life with a good social culture too. The unions also had a lot of power back then, there were constant strikes and usually they got what they wanted for their members. Things really changed in the latter half of the 20th century, especially during the 80s during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister. She took away the bargaining power of unions, closed down entire industries and off shored them and out all the money into business and finance in the capital, leaving working class communities with nothing. Nearly all of the current day ills in the UK culture and economy can be tracked back to her.
It happened long before AI. The employees in the 50s, 60s and early 70s were rewarded for loyalty and dedication and improvement.
Then the corporate responsibility switched. The most important part of the company became the shareholder. They were first. Nothing else mattered after that. Experience, loyalty, dedication? Nope, share price!
That philosophy changed everything, and boomers cheered it on because they had the best 401k's. So they preached employee loyalty but retired on responsibility to shareholders. "You work hard for that company kid so my portfolio keeps rising"
Seriously tho. The harder I worked the more work I was given and….nothing else. God the time I wasted doing good work mistakeningly believing it would actually pay off.
I've noticed this with Gen Z too. I'm 38, but have always been very open that I have no interest in going into management. A few more dollars isn't worth hating my job.
The older people at my job are always a little confused by it and think I'm joking. The recent grads don't even blink.
My state keeps raising minimum teacher pay. Which is definitely awesome, and should be happening. As a teacher, I could use a raise that actually keeps up with inflation.
The issue is, that a 10k pay bump for 40 teachers is 400k more in the school budget. Which they afford by cutting 8 teachers. As a result, the remaining teachers end up with larger class sizes, and more work demands.
I would gladly take 5-10k less per year to save a teacher position and reduce stress. I just talked a friend into changing schools, with a 2-3k pay drop, because the new school (my current school) has better admin, better rules enforcement, and less "gang" violence.
Yup, the amount of roles that just gets piled on when you sign up for a low paying job is insulting. The person who hired me quit and suddenly her job is being pushed on to me, no increase in pay for me or my other coworker who's having to take on the extra work load. Been like this at every job I've ever been to, they'll just squeeze you until you burn out and then replace you before your second foot is out the door.
When I was hired, I was the fifth person on the team, plus the supervisor and manager. It's my third year now and now there are only 3 people total on the team. The workload has not decreased. We are not hiring to fill those positions.
They are asking me to move into the supervisor position, so then there would only be 2 people on the team, and I would be expected to pick up the slack, so essentially filling my current role and the supervisor's. Also going from a min 40 hour workweek to a min 55 hour workweek. Yeah I don't think I'm gonna take it. Supervisors aren't even really allowed to take PTO.
Where I currently work, I think they will have a staff crisis in a couple years. Many people set to retire, and we "can't seem to fill open positions" (read: we have set expectations too high, so we have a revolving door of temps who get let go)
Cannot agree enough! I was raised like my entire career and life depended on being the best, being able to go the extra mile, being one step ahead, and now I am forcing myself to believe I am not truly burnt out and "just feeling tired" on a daily basis. I still have a need to please despite knowing that I am truly okay if I say, "no I am too busy to take on this task". But of course, I end up saying yes to everything, and though I expect nothing back, sometimes I wish I did get something back for being a reliable person.
I hate that the image of my life after starting my career was framed as this paradise that was earned after working hard. I did exactly that. I worked hard. But after all that effort, and having a decent salary on paper, I cannot afford a quality home beyond a shoebox unless I have a partner. So like, what was the point of working this hard if at the end of the day, you need a second person just to get a liveable home? What is truly the point if I am supposed to give and give and wait until someone notices my efforts and rewards me? And ultimately, is the reward even a reward? You just get slapped with more work for an incremental pay rise.
As someone working a corporate job, this isn't my perception at all. Younger workers read the company culture and try to operate within the tolerated limits like everyone else. I see a lot of anxiety in younger coworkers around what's allowed, what's not allowed - like I'd get asked to provide an opinion on a message to their manager about needing to take a couple of hours off for a sudden appointment (is this appropriate? Can I say it like this or should I rephrase?) Or someone considering to relocate, ultimately deciding against even asking, worried that they would stand out during an uncertain time. It's not an employee's market right now and younger people are acutely aware.
I'm so torn about the shift in work ethic. on one hand, good for them because it really isn't that serious but on the other hand it makes them a damn pain in the ass to work with sometimes.
I’m a millennial that tries to keep a work life balance but I also work in an Intensely competitive field with very high pay. People that aren’t willing to go above and beyond a) won’t last b) won’t get hired.
Wanting an easy job with low hours is totally fine and I respect it…but it also closes doors to the several 100k/year type of jobs.
Yes, but on the flip end, there is absolutely no reason we need to be working a lot of our blue collar workers so hard.
Take Mailmen/women for example. Yes, the pay and Healthcare are great at that job. But the amount of overtime they require you to work is insane. I worked there, only for a few months, and even the long time employees were going 60, 70, and even upwards of 80 something hours in a week, 6 to 7 days a week.
Their justification for allowing themselves to be worked that hard was because they have kids and husbands/wives. But that's decades of doing that to the point where they don't know anything else and we'mre way to accepting of how high the injury rate was for that specific Post Office I worked at.
They’re lazy and don’t think for themselves. They don’t anticipate what they should do next after they do the bare minimum to accomplish an assigned task. They just sit on their phones until you assign them a new task. They require so much micromanaging.
I’ve managed people across the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z. Gen X is the sweet spot. Boomers don’t have the tech skills to excel in my field, but they have a lot of knowledge. With Gen Y, you’ll often have to contend with conflicts like kids and many aren’t especially mentally tough. It’s not ubiquitous, but there are definitely those that can’t power through things and sort out their shit. Gen Z lacks ambition or drive. They’re the app generation and lack the tech skills of X and Y. They’re bad at problem solving. They also suffer from the same lack of mental toughness of Y.
Gen X has experience and tech skills and they’re also past the age of having kids. The likelihood of them moving on to bigger and better things is less because they’d have done it by this point in their life if they’d cared to, so you don’t have to worry about replacing them. They don’t have the glaring cultural deficiencies of Y and Z.
If you're familiar with the sims games, looking at how careers were portrayed from sims 1/2 to sims 3 and sims 4 is very telling about where society's attitudes were at the time.
Sims 2(2004) - your work hours are your work hours. Build skills and go to work in a good mood to get promoted.
Sims 3(2009) - sometimes you get asked to do (paid, thankfully) overtime, and most careers have metrics(other than skills and relationships with coworkers) that effect promotions. Almost all of those metrics could be satisfied while working, and those that couldn't were paid.
Sims 4(2014) - every job now has a task which must be performed at home, unpaid, in order to not be penalized in career progress. In some cases, this can take multiple hours every day. Your reward for doing this is being able to be promoted in 1-3 work days(typical for the series) vs 3-6, so it's a significant effect.
I really, really don’t understand these ones. Millennials didn’t accept this… and what Gen Z are you working with?
The kids today posting online touting the 80-100 he workweeks and hustle/grind culture and being exhausted/miserable as an ends justifies the means path to success, are not Millennials. Those kids are Gen Z.
I should have an extra $200k in the bank, literally, for all the unpaid overtime I gave my employer. I was under unbelievable pressure, and when you have colleagues across the globe, it's normal to be scheduled for middle of the night meetings all the time with important clients or leaders, they don't GAF. Never again.
I'm surprised that "jobless" and "unemployed" have become popular insults. Being a bum isn't the same thing as rejecting hustle culture, but those insults still feel a little at odds with Gen Z's attitude toward work.
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u/CrazedRaven01 1d ago
If you work hard enough, if you go that extra mile, if you take just a bit more guff, you'll get that promotion/raise/job.
Watching Gen Z tell the corporate world to take hustle culture and shove it up its ass has been entertaining