Anyone else up for some real rage? I can’t promise that there won’t be profanity in this post. In fact, I promise that there will be, and that it will be awesome. Let’s go.
People don’t usually talk about these things that I talk about, for fear that The Man will tear their fucking faces off if they tell the truth about previous companies and how corporate office really run themselves, but I am fucking sick of living in fear. One can tell that I have an insubordinate streak. It’s a shame, because I am extremely good at every other fucking thing the workplace cares about except subordination; but that’s one thing I never got down, and while it’s more important (in the office context) than any other social skill, I’m too old to learn it.
Let’s talk about the reputation that my generation, the Millennials (born ca. 1982 to 2000), has for being “entitled”. This is a fun topic.
I’ve written about why so-called “job hopping” doesn’t deserve to be stigmatized. Don’t get me wrong: if someone leaves a generally good job after 9 months only because he seeks a change of scenery, then he’s a fucking idiot. If you have a good thing going, you shouldn’t seek a slightly better thing every year. Eventually, that will blow up in your face and ruin your life. Good jobs are actually kinda rare. I repeat: if you find a job that continues to enhance your career and that doesn’t make you unhappy, and you don’t stick with it for a few years, then you’re an idiot. You should stay when you find something good. A genuine mentor is rare and hard to replace. That’s not what I’m talking about here.
The problem? Most jobs aren’t good, or don’t make sense for the long term. Sometimes, the job shouldn’t exist in the first place, provides no business value, and is terminated by one side or the other, possibly amicably. Sometimes, the boss is a pathological micromanager who prevents his reports from getting anything done, or an extortionist thug who expects 100% dedication to his career goals and gives nothing in return. Sometimes, people are hired under dishonest pretenses. Hell, I’ve seen startups hire three people at the same time for the same leadership position, without each other’s knowledge of course. (In New York, that move is called “pulling a Knewton.”) Sometimes, management changes that occur shortly after a job is taken turn a good job into an awful one. This nonsense sounds very uncommon, right? No. Each of these pathologies is individually uncommon, but there are so many failure modes for an employment relationship that, taken in sum, they are common. All told, I’d say that about 40 percent of jobs manage to make it worthwhile to keep showing up after 12 months. Sometimes, the job ends. It might be a layoff for business reasons. Sometimes it’s a firing that may not even be the person’s fault. Most often, it’s just pigeonholing into low-importance, career-incoherent work, leaving the person to get the hint that she wasn’t picked for better things and leave voluntarily. Mostly, this political injection is random noise with no correlation to personal quality. Still, I think it’s reasonable to say that 60% of new jobs fail in the first 12 months (even if many go into a “walking dead” state where termination is not a serious risk, but in which it’s still pointless and counterproductive to linger). That means 13 percent of people are going to draw four duds for reasons that are no fault of their own. One in eight people, should they do the honest and mutually beneficial thing which is to leave a job when it becomes pointless, becomes an unemployable job hopper. Seriously, what the fuck?
So let me get one thing out there. Not only is the “job hopping” stigma outdated, it’s wrong and it’s stupid. If you still buy into the “never hire job hoppers” mentality, you should fucking stop using your company as a nursing home and instead, for the good of society, use an actual nursing home as your nursing home. I’m serious. If you really think that a person who’s had a few short-term jobs deserves to be blacklisted over it when the real corporate criminals thrive, then letting you make decisions that affect peoples’ lives is like letting five-year-olds fly helicopters, and you should get the fuck out of everything important before you do any more damage to peoples’ lives and the economy. I’m sorry, but if you cling to those old prejudices, then the future has no place for you.
It needed to be said. So I did.
The “job hopping” stigma is one rage point of mine, but let’s move to another: our reputation as an “entitled” Millennial generation. Really? Here are some of the reasons why we’re considered entitled by out-of-touch managers:
- We “job hop” often, tending to have 4 to 6 jobs (on average) by age 30.
- We expect to be treated as colleagues and proteges rather than subordinates.
- After our first jobs, we lose interest in “prestigious” institutions, instead taking a mercenary approach that might favor a new company, or no company.
- We push for non-conventional work arrangements, such as remote work and flex-time. If we put in 8 hours of face time, we expect direct interest in our careers by management because (unlike prior generations who had no choice) we consider an eight-hour block a real sacrifice.
- We question authority.
- We expect positive feedback and treat the lack of it as a negative signal (“trophy kids”).
Does this sound entitled? I’ll grant that there’s some serious second-strike disloyalty that goes on, with a degree of severe honesty (what is “job hopping” but an honesty about the worthlessness of most work relationships?) that would have been scandalous 30 years ago, but is it entitled? That word has a certain meaning, and the answer is “no”.
To be entitled, as a pejorative rather than a matter-of-fact declaration about an actual contractual agreement, implies one of two things:
- to assume a social contract where none exists (i.e. to perceive entitlement falsely.)
- to expect another party to uphold one side of an existing (genuine) social contract while failing to perform one’s own (i.e. one-sided entitlement).
Type I entitlement is expressed in unreasonable expectations of other people. One example is the “Nice Guy Syndrome“, wherein a man expects sexual access in return for what most people consider to be common courtesy. The “Nice Guy” is assuming a social contract between him and “women” that neither exists nor makes sense. Type II is the “culture of entitlement” sometimes associated with a failed welfare state, wherein generationally jobless people– who, because they have ceased looking for work, are judged to be failing their end of the social contract– continue to expect social services. These are people whose claims are rooted in a genuine social contract– the welfare state’s willingness to provide insurance for those who continually try to make themselves productive, but fail for reasons not their fault– but don’t hold up their end of the deal.
So, do either of these apply to Millennials? Let me assess each of the six charges above.
1. Millennials are “job hoppers”. There’s some truth in that one. The most talented people under 30 are not going to stick around in a job that hurts their careers. We’re happy to take orders and do the less interesting work for a little while, if management assists us in our careers, with an explicit intent to prepare us for more interesting stuff later. Failing that, we treat the job as a simple economic transaction. We’re not going to suffer a dues-paying evaluative period for four years when another company’s offering a faster track. Or, if we’re lucky, we can start our own companies and skip over the just-a-test work entirely and do things that actually matter right away. Most of us have been fired or laid off “at will” at least once, and we have no problem with this new feature (job volatility) of the economy. None of us consider lifelong employment an entitlement or right. We don’t expect long-term loyalty, nor do we give it away lightly.
2. Millennials “expect” to be treated as proteges. Not quite. Being a cosmopolitan, well-studied generation exposed to a massive array of different concepts and behaviors from all over the world, we expect very little of other people. We’ve seen so much that we realize it’s not rational to approach people with any major assumptions. The world is just too damn big and complicated to believe in global social contracts. Getting screwed doesn’t shock or disgust or hurt us. It doesn’t thwart our expectations, because we don’t really have any. We simply leave, and quickly. For us, long-term loyalty is the exception, and yes, we’re only going to stay at a job for 5 years if it continues to be challenging and beneficial to our careers. That’s not because we “expect” certain things, and we aren’t “making a statement” when we change jobs. It’s not personal or an affront or intentional “desertion”. We can do better, that’s all.
3. Millennials don’t have respect for prestige and tradition. Yes and no. We don’t start out that way. The late-2000s saw one of the most competitive college admissions environments in history. Then there’s the race to get into top graduate departments or VC-darling startups or investment banking– the last of these being the Ivy League of the corporate world. Then something happens. Around 27, people realize that that shit doesn’t matter. You can’t eat prestige, and many of the most prestigious companies are horrible places to work. Oh, and we think we’re hot shit until we get our asses handed to us by superior programmers and traders from no-name universities and learn that their educations were quite good as well. We realize that work ethic and creativity and long-term diligence and deliberate practice are the real stuff and we lose interest in slaving away for 90 hours per week just because a company has a goddamn name.
4. Many of us expect non-conventional work/life arrangements. This is true, and there’s a reason for it. What is the social contract of an exempt salaried position, under which hourage expectations are only defined by social expectations rather than contract? As far as I can tell, there are two common models. Model A: worker produces enough work not to get fired, manager signs a check. Model B: worker puts a serious investment of self and emotional energy into the work as a genuine working relationship would involve, and management returns the favor with career support and coherence. Under either model, the 8-hour workday is obsolete. Model A tells us that, if a worker can put in a 2-hour day and stay employed, he’s holding up his end of the deal, and it’s management’s fault for not giving him interesting work that would motivate him to perform beyond the minimum. Model B expects a mutual contract of loyalty to each other’s interests, but does not specify a duration or mode of work. Model B might be held to generally support in-office work with traditional hours, for the sake of collaboration and mentoring, but that opens up a separate discussion, especially in the context of individual differences regarding when and how people work best.
5. Millennials question authority. True, and that’s a virtue. Opposing authority because it is authority is no better than being blindly (or cravenly) loyal to it, but questioning it is essential. People who are so insecure that they can’t stand to be questioned should never be put in leadership positions; they don’t have the cojones for it. I question my own ideas all the time; if you expect me to follow you, then I will question yours. It’s a sign of respect to question someone’s ideas, not a personal challenge. It’s when smart people don’t question your ideas that you should be worried; it means they’ve already decided you’re an idiot and they will ignore or undermine you.
6. We expect positive feedback and respond negatively to a lack of acknowledgement. That’s true, but not because we believe “everyone’s a winner”. If anything, it’s the opposite. We know that most people lose at work and would prefer to play a different game when that appears likely to happen. No, it’s not about “trophies”. A trophy is a piece of plastic. We get bored unless there’s a real, hard-to-fake signal that we aren’t wasting our time. Not a plastic trophy, but management that takes our career needs seriously and complete autonomy over our direction. We know that most people, in their work lives, end up with incompetent or parasitic bosses who waste years of their time on career-incoherent wild goose chases, and we refuse to be on the butt of that joke. Does this mean that we’re not content to be “average”, and that we require being on the upside of a zero-sum executive favoritism to stay engaged with our work? Well, in order to have it not be that way, you need to create a currently-atypical work environment where average people don’t end up as total losers. With all the job hopping we do, we don’t care about relative measures of best or better. We want good. Make a job good and people won’t worry about what others around them are getting.
I think, with this exposition, that there’s a clear picture of the Millennial attitude. Yes, we take second-strike disloyalty to a degree that, even ten years ago, would be considered insolent, brazen, and even reckless in the face of the career damage done (even now) to the job-hoppers. We’ve grown bolder, post-2008. Quit us, and we quit. It’s not that we like changing jobs every few months– believe me, we fucking don’t. We’re looking for the symbiotic 5- or 10-year-fit, as any rational person would, but we’re not going to lie to ourselves for years– conveniently paying dues on evaluative nonsense work while our bosses spend half-decades pretending to look for a real use for our underutilized talents (only to throw us out in favor of fresher, more clueless, younger versions of ourselves)– after drawing a dud.
Is the Millennial attitude exasperating for older managers, used to a higher tolerance for slack on matters of career coherency? I’m sure it is. I’m sure that the added responsibility imposed by a generation characterized by fast flight is unpleasant. It is not, however, entitled. It’s not Type I entitlement because we don’t assume the existence of a social contract that was never made. We only hold employers to what they actually promise us. If they entice us with promises of career development and interesting work, then we expect that. If they’re honest about the job’s shortcomings, we respect that, too. But we only expect the social contract that we’re explicitly given. I’d also argue that it’s not Type II entitlement because Millennials are, when given proper motivation, very hard-working and creative. We want to work. We want genuine work, not bullshit meetings to make the holder of some sinecure feel important.
What are we, if not “entitled”? We’re the opposite. We’re a disentitled generation. We never believed in the corporate paternalist social contract, and most of us are comfortable with this brave new world that has followed its demise. Yes, we’re mercenary. We respond in kind (in fact, often disproportionately) to genuine loyalty, but we’re far too damn honest to pretend we’re getting a good deal when we’re thrown into a three-year dues-paying period rendered obsolete in a world where fast advancement is possible and fast firing is probable for those who don’t advance. I’m in software, where, by age 35, becoming a technical expert (you need a national reputation in your specialty if you want to be employable as a programmer on decent terms by that age) or an executive becomes mandatory. As this leaves 13 years to “make a mark”, one simply will not find people willing to endure a years-long dues-paying period that one would want to hire. Asking someone to risk 2 of those 13 years on dues-paying (that might lead nowhere) is like asking a person to throw 15 percent of her net worth into a downside-heavy investment strategy with no potential for diversification– a bad idea. Reasonable dues-paying arrangements may have existed under the old corporate social contract of cradle-to-grave institutional employment, but that’s extinct now. So should be the “job hopper” stigma and the early-stage dementia patients who still believe in it.
