December 13, 2008, 8:11 pm
Ten Predictions About Generation Y
Recently, a person posed a question on Twitter, asking whether or not Generation Y would begin to appreciate their jobs in the receding economy, rather than approaching the world as they have been.
It's very well known that Generation Y, with its twenty-somethings have a very different attitude about the workplace. By our older, perhaps more seasoned colleagues we're seen as lazy, inept, fraught with attitude, and lazy. The tweet regarding Generation Y was a classic clash between the older and younger worlds: "don't you young yuppies appreciate what the company is doing here? You should be thankful to have a job!"
Though it may work like that for the moment, I think that a monumental shift will be taking place in the workforce in the next few years. And so, in response to this question, here are ten things I think Generation Y will do in the next few years (tip: show "appreciation" isn't one of them):
- We'll show even less loyalty to the companies we work for than we do now. It used to be that if you got hired you kept your job, and if the company went out of business there were lots of jobs. Then the seventies came, and the word "layoff" entered the public consciousness. Our unwillingness to display loyalty has nothing to do with our lack of loyalty - it has to do with YOUR lack of loyalty, Baby Boomers. You've shown us, quite effectively, that you don't give a damn about us - your employees - or our needs. We're expendable. Fine; but don't expect us to consider you unexpendable either.
- We'll end Social Security. None of us actually think we're going to get it anyway; you and your government policies of the 1980's saw to that. Boomers might get their checks, but we're going to plan for our own retirement, we're going to invest on our own, and we're going to stop funding a failed system.
- A huge number of us will be self-employed. This goes right along with #1. We don't trust the company. Besides, most of us have highly technical skills, we know how to use the internet, and we can make more money working for ourselves than we can working for you. I see this already in the community I work in: more than half the developers have their own side businesses. Many of them make six figures when you add in their day jobs. Plus, it adds a second source of income, reduces the reliance on the company, and increases flexibility.
- We'll shrink the size of government. You clearly cannot be trusted to run the government. See bailing out criminals with $700 billion in money that you know you'll never have to pay back as Exhibit A. To be sure, we'll engage in more social and political causes; that is to be sure. But you can bet we'll also shrink the size, scope, and reach of the government, leaving more up to NGOs and the goodness of people who care about particular causes.
- We won't retire. We've watched you all work for decades, expecting to retire, only to find the economy tanking and the values of your investments destroyed. Instead, we'll take mini-retirements: short periods of time, not lasting more than three or four years, where we travel, explore, and experiment. After all, isn't it better to take two years and travel with the kids when we're 40 than to be too old to do it when we're 70?
- We'll have 20 jobs in our careers. It used to be you joined a company and stayed there. Not us. We move too fast, learn too quickly, change too often, and want to accomplish too much. Good employers will know this, and invest in keeping us around, not with the old "delayed rewards" like higher salaries after a period of time or two weeks of vacation after three years, but immediate things like catered meals, free health insurance, increasing retention bonuses, and signing advances.
- Health care won't look the same in ten years. We're smart enough to know everyone gets sick and you shouldn't have to be wealthy in order to afford a doctor. Medicine will once again be a service industry, and we'll redesign the way we pay for health care in America.
- We'll enforce work-life balance. Dozens of popular artists have written songs about how horrible it'd be not to live life to the fullest: Rascal Flatts, Mark Shultz, 33 Miles, Five for Fighting, Tim McGraw, just to name a few. We get it. Life is short. And we don't want to spend it behind our desks. We don't know when life will be over, and we want to spend time with the people that matter. Working to live will beat out living to work, and the companies we work for will have to understand that.
- Our lives will have a point. Tired old mission statements are useless to us. You'd better show up with a vision or we're going to yawn and change the channel. We've all read Dilbert and we find The Office funny because we see it as YOUR life, not ours. We're going to have a vision for the future, and we're going to pursue it relentlessly.
- We'll keep learning, keep inventing, keep growing. The greatest inventions of 1990's and the early 21st century were invented by people 30 or under. Amazon.com by Jeff Bezos (30), Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (20), Netscape by Marc Andreessen (22), to name only a few. Ideas come from young people too, and we'll embrace that. (The ages reflect their age at the time of the invention)
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Comments:
George wrote on December 14, 2008, 9:12 am:
Well said, Brandon.
pianoguy wrote on December 19, 2008, 12:56 pm:
Though I agree with George, it does sound to me a little bit "in your face", but I know you better than that. It also seems to come off as a bit narcicistic and/or "me" centered, though again I know you to be of better stuff than that. It's a blog, not your life statement, right?
But I really like it in macro, and appreciate the time and thought you put behind it.
See you in CAL!