If you read Governing magazine (and really, who doesn’t?) you may have stumbled across this delightful passage in the September issue, in an article about how Generation Y isn’t taking enough government jobs.
“[Gen Y is] widely viewed by their management elders as being impatient, demanding, tech-addicted, narcissistic and needy.”
Widely viewed? Seriously?! Who participated in the poll, Mr. Spacely, Mr. Slate and Dennis the Menace’s neighbor?
It’s tempting to dismiss this as the touched rants of someone who advocates a career in government, but it wasn’t the only time that week I witnessed a generational smear. At a meeting of other management elders I attended, someone complained about how “entitled” a job candidate had been. “They’re all like that,” another said, to the enthusiastic nods of many in the room. Yeah, and get off my lawn! Kids these days!
You’d think it would be difficult to generalize about 70 million people (if you use the generous “echo boom” boundaries of those born between 1977 and 1994). But an entire industry has sprung up to do just that for recruiters, businesses and marketers – all for a reasonable fee, of course. As more boomers retire and Gen Y comes of age, people in their early twenties are expected to jump from 14 percent to 21 percent of the workforce, and companies fear a typhoon of cultural change. Consulting firm Deloitte & Touche puts out a report seemingly every week on adapting to your new Gen Y employees (they like to volunteer! They crave quick advancement!) Do a little Googling, and you find such must-bookmarks as:
n “Generation Y Banking Behaviors and Attitudes.” (They’re not just on the Internet, they actually walk into branches.)
n “Tough Customers: How to Reach Gen Y.” (“Become ‘hip.’ You have to be present where teenagers want to spend time, in skateboard parks, at concerts, in malls.” I’m not making this up.)
n “Generation Y: Motivating and Training a New Generation of Employees.” (You mean besides with a paycheck?)
In all these and more, the emerging gospel is that Generation Y (or the Millennials, or iGen, or whatever are being called these days) are intelligent but egotistical Internet-obsessed hooligans who are coddled by their parents and dismissive of your authority.
In other words: Pap.
The mind seizures when you consider how countless companies have shelled out countless millions so consultants could sell them on generalizations and insults, conjuring libel out of anecdotes and demographic algebra. If you altered your meeting schedule because the secretary is on MySpace, or worse, dangled mini-tasks and gold stars because Gen Y “needs constant challenges,” you’re a moron.
Kids these days are kids like any other day.
TALKING ‘BOUT
ALL GENERATIONS
I speak as a member of Generation X, which means, as the consultants of my youth said, as an angst-ridden slacker. Except I wasn’t particularly angst-filled, have held a job my whole adult life, and never really had a thing for Winona Ryder.
So I can relate when experts say Gen Y is “laid back, late blooming or just lost, ” and “more and more . . . ready neither for college nor for work.”
Except that first quote is from Time magazine, describing the twentysomethings of 1990, and the second from “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 report from the Department of Education. Which proves that nothing persists more than the idea that kids are trouble.
I remember when “slacker” terms started catching on, right about the time Kurt Cobain banged his head along with cheerleaders in anarchy logos. And if that one piece of pop culture history can cement a legacy, consider what triple the number of television channels and the explosion of the Internet means.
Between Paris Hilton and Lauren Conrad and “Gossip Girl,” it’s no wonder businesses are easily sold on the idea that young people are venal and narcissistic.
Never mind that this is an unscientific sample. People appear on reality television for the very reason that they’re venal and narcissistic, and don’t represent a proper cross-section of society. To judge the average 22-year-old by Kim Kardashian is to say every ’50s teen was unstable, tortured and prone to breaking the law. That is, to think an entire generation was represented by “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Are the youth icons of today even that much worse than before? In the new book “The Star Machine,” author Jeanine Basinger writes about how film studios used to build celebrities from the ground up, giving them everything from cosmetic surgery to etiquette training. And if they were found in bed with someone underage, all it took was a little money and influence to keep it out of the tabloids.
If camera phones existed in this “golden age,” would Errol Flynn have been Matthew McConaughey, or Bette Davis hounded like Jennifer Aniston? Pity poor Vanessa Hudgens, star of the ultra-wholesome “High School Musical,” for learning the hard way not to have a picture taken of yourself naked, even in the privacy of your bedroom. If times had been different, would Annette Funicello been caught doing something else with the Skippy?
Which brings us to MySpace, Friendster and all the other outlets for the young and naive. Sociologists try to argue that Gen Y has no boundaries, that they’re more willing to bare themselves to the world.
Baloney. They simply have more outlets.
If my locker door from 9th grade was posted online, oh, the shame. Lots of stuff about Canadian rock band Rush, a picture of Paula Abdul (hey, she was hot) and notes never passed to girls. Prom pictures and hockey hair. All my friends saw these things; with a MySpace profile, so would have everyone else. Most teens go through a period where they believe their feelings are the most important on earth.
Then they mature. They hold things back. They learn sense.
What’s changed is not the message – it’s the medium.
RISE OF THE
YOUNG CAPITALISTS
But let’s consider for a moment that there’s some truth to the stereotypes. That your new bright young employee is going to come in, lacking underwear, sure they can change the world and convinced that they need more money and more responsibilities.
You, America, made them this way.
There’s an inherent contradiction in this country on the Machiavellian way capitalism is practiced on the macro level and the idealized work ethic on the micro level. Our myths prize those who toil for long hours to put food on the table for their family, and the Gordon Gekko who crushes companies in slicked-back hair. If anything, young employees have gotten wise. Why not ask for a raise or a promotion any opportunity you have, when the company you work for would capriciously fire your entire division to increase the stock price by $1 a share?
Last week, Globest.com, a real estate Web site (I was bored), published an article about recruiting talent. They quoted Lynn Gray, who runs recruiting for Lehman Bros. global real estate group, as saying, “What we are looking for is the next managing director and we are seeing some real superstars. The problem is these kids are so smart and so motivated that they are not patient enough to start out as an analyst and hold out for 10 years to become a managing director.”
Well who is? Chances are the firm would show you no loyalty – managing director? Not yours! – if its financial situation changed after 10 years.
If the job market shifts, I have no doubt young employees who may bounce around frequently and crave promotions will happily hold onto whatever position they have – just like everyone else.
Which is pretty much true for any Gen Y stereotype delivered as truth.
Read the “cons of Gen Y,” according to a report put out by NAS Recruitment Communications, and see if it describes anyone you know:
n “Impatient: Raised in a world dominated by technology and instant gratification.”
n “Skeptical: In recent years there has been more scamming, cheating, lying and exploiting than ever from the major figures in the media. That includes everyone from rock stars to the president.”
n “Blunt and expressive: Self expression is favored over self control. Making their point is most important.”
n “They are still young: Although they have a ‘seen it all, done it all’ air about them, lack of life experience means they don’t know everything yet.”
Sounds to me like this is true of every young person ever. At 17, I knew plenty of people who were blunt, impatient know-it-alls. I know some 50-year-olds like that, too.
Michael Franzini, who traveled the country photographing Gen Y for his new book “100 Young Americans,” prefers to see the individuality of his subjects, rather than misguided generational boiler plates. There were goths then, there are goths now. When he was a kid (he’s 40), they said Pac-Man was going to melt our brains, just as some accuse the Internet of creating short attention spans now.
“The range of teenagers today is comparable to teenagers before,” Franzini says. “Some of them had parents that pushed really hard, some had parents who weren’t even there. You name the scenario, we found it. Everyone is different.”