

Dude, Where's My Job? - ojbyrne
http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude-where%E2%80%99s-my-job/

======
andyn
One of the comments was probably better than the actual article:

[http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude-
where%E2%80%99s-my-j...](http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude-
where%E2%80%99s-my-job/#comment-81567)

~~~
rgrieselhuber
Agreed. There must be something about the gravitational center of my eyeballs
that causes them to roll upwards toward the ceiling whenever someone refers to
this generation as 'entitled.'

~~~
Prrometheus
Repeating something that has been said so many times that it has become
popular wisdom is an easy way to fill word count.

~~~
iamdave
My eyeballs involuntarily roll up just the same, but I think it's only because
it's an erroneous generalization. Generation Y is starting to split in half,
but I don't think anyone's really taking notice.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
What split are you seeing? I'm very curious.

~~~
iamdave
I've been noticing it for a while, but it became ever more evident to me when
I read this (<http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html>)

Namely, Gen Y is beginning to segment into those who'd rather keep up with the
jonses and be immersed in culture (typically younger members of Gen Y), those
who'd rather be more involved in social matters (the median), and those who
are more focused on establishing their lives for the future as THE primary
goal.

And the amazing thing is, it's incredibly migratory. The younger groups who
follow MTV culture either phase out of it, and move into the second category,
or cling to the pop lifestyle and migrate over into one of the other two,
using pop as a blanket for wherever they go.

It makes little sense right now, I plan to research it rather fully this
summer.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
That is an interesting article. Supposedly I'm at the leading edge of the
millenials, having been born in late 1982. But not a single person I know
resembles these characters portrayed as hipsters.

On the other hand, I know quite a few civic-minded and tech-savvy peers who do
give a damn.

------
trickjarrett
I think the real interesting part of Gen Y is the amount of writing which is
being devoted to us. Is Gen Y really that difficult to understand or so
unbelievable? Does it deserve all this writing and attempts to dissect it?

What's really interesting to me is how much criticism we're getting for
wanting jobs that aren't a repeat of the workforce before us. Imagine if the
Internet media was around when the generations shifted to cities and away from
rural settings! Farmers crying out about the lost workforce from their
children who went to work in the industrial revolution factories. Or maybe the
outcry even further back when shepherds' kids decide to settle down and build
a farm! _Gasp_ Shock horror. Cats sleeping with dogs in the streets. Anarchy
abounds. It is... simply put... the end of the world.

Gag. I'm just so tired of the Gen Y angle and BS that gets written about it.

------
mdasen
So, what makes Gen Y the most entitled generation ever? I'd argue that title
goes to the Baby Boomer generation (at least for the time being). They're the
generation that decided that, while their parents paid for their education,
kids should really pay for theirs (paying for zero educations in their
lifetime while each other generation will pay for 1). They're the generation
that has decided anything that costs money can be shuttled onto future
generations through debt. They're the generation that paid too little in
Social Security and Medicare taxes who are gearing up to fight for expanded
benefits paid for by their children.

We'll see if Gen Y decides to be as entitled. Yeah, Baby Boomers get annoyed
with Gen Y kids who think they know everything when they don't. Most people in
my generation think they're a ton smarter than they actually are and think
that minimal work should result in great reward. Maybe we're no better than
the baby boomers, but I resent this implication that we think the world
revolves around us. The baby boomer generation seems to like to forget that
part of their success was that they were able to shift burdens onto others
(often their children).

I guess I should apologize for how I started off this comment. It was too
harsh. I got a little too aggravated by the article and being lectured down to
by a generation whose greatest accomplishment was being born in the only
industrialized nation not bombed out by WWII and, therefore, had the
opportunity to create with barely any competition. OK, I'm still aggravated.
I'm sorry.

Most people are hardworking folks and this author is trying to appeal to the
few that are probably less hardworking and want to blame society on someone
else. It happens all the time - it's those immigrants that are making your
life suck and the like.

I think we'd all be better off if we remembered who we are really - not the
idealized vision we have of ourselves. Baby Boomers went through a period of
pot smoking and being lazy. Before them, dating was the hot button being seen
as a waste of time and a disregard for morality. Let's all try to remember
that life is a little more universal than this essay would have you believe.

~~~
eru
> the only industrialized nation not bombed out by WWII

Switzerland anyone?

~~~
steveplace
Watches and chocolate does not make an industrialized nation.

;)

------
biohacker42
My generation is X, they called us lazy because back in the late 80s and early
90s the job market was the worst since... WW2? correct me if I'm wrong.

Crap job market = lazy generation.

And because the Y generation grew up during unprecedented economic growth they
are the most entitled generation.

If we could bottle folksy wisdom, we'd have a lot of stupid in bottles.

~~~
nihilocrat
I much prefer bottled alcohol, it helps us forget the stupid things people
sometimes say.

------
jumper
Oh yeah, cause I just _demand_ to have balloons and a cheap plaque for my
first day on a job.... or, you know, maybe not? My gen is probably
unreasonable (few people are in any gen methinks) but "they" clearly just
don't get it at all.

------
jamesbritt
How does one manage to take people born within a range of 14 years and make
sweeping generalizations about them?

Grouping people into Gen This or Generation That is astrology for
sociologists.

------
tptacek
Google NYC had "afternoon tea"? What does that even mean?

~~~
gaius
Tea: a drink prepared by soaking leaves in hot water

Afternoon: a time after midday but before evening.

HTH!

~~~
tptacek
So what you're saying is that Google has banned tea in the afternoons. You're
right, that was helpful.

~~~
patio11
There is a social institution in some countries where tea is consumed in the
afternoon and, importantly, this comes with a societal expectation that work
stops during the consumption of tea. The societal expectation is similar to
the expectation in the US that most professionals are not available for
productive labor between 12:00 and 1:00 because they will be eating lunch.

Thus, when an American company says they're instituting afternoon tea-times,
what they mean is they are adding a break to the workday which is not
typically present in American companies. When an American company which
previously had afternoon tea-time eliminates it, it means that the workers
have lost a socially acceptable period in which they were not expected to
labor.

------
io
Same as it ever was. I narrowly miss the Gen Y cut-off, but was popular to bag
on my generation's failings when we were first entering the workforce.
Whatever.

(Aside: You don't even need a Kindle to spot this author's crutch words. Am I
the only one who thought the repeated use of "cohort" was unusual? Dude,
where's your thesaurus?)

~~~
tokenadult
The word "cohort" is a technical term in demographic studies, and the correct
word for the article.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohort_(statistics)>

~~~
io
Touché. That'll teach me to only read the first few definitions
(<http://dictionary.reference.com/dic?q=cohort>)

I see it now, all the way down at number 5! Everything they said about my
generation was true. :)

Here's an amusing coincidence. I was a student at JJ Hill Elementary school in
St. Paul, MN in the late 80s. This was the gifted/talented magnet back then, I
don't know if it still is. I see you're affiliated with Minnesota's
gifted/talented educational program. Can I somehow blame you for my inability
to read all the way to the fifth definition? :)

~~~
tokenadult
The Gifted and Talented magnet school in St. Paul now has the name Capitol
Hill. I don't know if that is a successor school to the one you remember.

In general, I'm not sure how schools have been teaching reading in specific
places in the relevant generations, but I would agree with the critics who say
that reading could have been better taught than it usually was in school over
the last few generations.

[http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-
about/dp/00609134...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-Johnny-Cant-Read-
about/dp/0060913401/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning-
about...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning-
about/dp/0262510766/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-
Science-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science-
Based-Problems/dp/0679781595/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-
Brad...](http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-
Bradford/dp/0262134381/)

Best wishes in your continued efforts to add to your technical vocabulary. I
learn new words fairly regularly here on HN.

------
wolfmanstout
The article sneers that "seven out of 10 rank themselves “above average” in
academic ability."

This bias is not specific to Gen-Y:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect>

------
mojonixon
wtf is a generation anyway? I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is
gen-x? Basically these articles are corporate HR people bitching about people
realizing that they've become disposable--the corporate/employee contract has
dissolved--and responding accordingly.

~~~
sethg
_I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x?_

They keep having kids at younger and younger ages....

------
sabat
So sick of crap like this. I'm Gen-X and very much remember being called whiny
and entitled. We were neither -- no more than any 20-somethings have ever
been.

~~~
potatolicious
Don't pay too much attention to the article - Macleans magazine's core
demographic is primarily boomer. This is just a feel-good article for them.

[edit] Now that I think of it, this is terribly ironic. An article complaining
about how Gen-Yers all want gold stars and reassurances that they're good...
written for boomers who want gold stars and reassurances that they're good :)

------
time_management
Fail.

 _They graduated with the expectation that it was going to be a sellers’
market, that they were going to have multiple offers, step into an upper
management role and have significant strategic impact on a Fortune 500
company, and that’s just not the reality._

What? The moderate expansion of 2004-07 has barely passed and already it's
being romanticized and blown out of proportion. The OP is completely out of
touch with reality.

Getting into an upper-management role out of college, and having significant
impact on a Fortune 500 company, did not happen, except for extremely well-
connected people. The median Ivy grad, much less median college grad, did not
have that as an option, and no one expected it either.

In fact, the major reason the bulk of the talent went into finance was its
reputation for having a faster career track. They would rather pay dues for 4
years working 70 hours per week than for 10 years working 50.

------
Allocator2008
Being born in 1981, which according to wikipedia is the last year of Gen X,
the following year, 1982, being the beginning of Gen Y, I consider myself more
of a Gen X'er than a Gen Y'er. That said, just from the point of view of
software, it is not fair I don't think to call Gen Y "entitled" because there
is a lot more to know about technology than there was even 10 years ago. To
keep up, people always need to be learning new things. So Gen Y has a burden
unlike any previous generation of just the vast array of knowledge of
different programming languages, etc. they need to be able to compete - a vast
breadth of knowledge, if not depth. So it is really uncalled for to call Gen Y
"entitled" as a whole group. Sure there are "spoiled brats" in every
generation, but we cannot make these kinds of generalizations, especially in
the technology sector. And even the whole notion of this article displays
archaic thinking, regarding the job market, at least in technology. The whole
"get a job" thing has been more replaced with "get a gig", i.e., people are
more into independent contracting/consulting etc. than before, so Gen Y is not
necessarily the same as Gen X in terms of trying to find a long-term
employment, at least in technology. It is more a generation of independent
consultants that is coming up. This article is wrong from top to bottom, wrong
in calling Gen Y "entitled" and wrong to think that the ills of the job market
are going to finally be all that damaging to them, since they are more
independently minded than their predecessors. A response to this could be:
What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0
and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise.

~~~
gaius
_What happens when deprecated purveyors of old technology get hit with web 2.0
and 3.0? The answer is they get replaced. By the same Gen Y they so despise._

That's not really true tho'. The skills of uploading a video to YouTube or
making a website with PHP are insignificant compared to inventing TCP and
wiring the entire planet with bandwidth. Could Gen Y bootstrap the Internet if
it didn't already exist? That's an open question.

~~~
potatolicious
Every generation has its great engineering challenges. While you may have
invented TCP and wired up the planet, Gen Y'ers are here inventing HSPA and
wireless-ing up the planet. New technologies will always come along, and there
will never be a shortage of difficult technologies to implement.

To think that because you guys started this whole internet thing means there's
no difficult work left to do? That's absurd.

~~~
qw
I have a feeling that most of the real engineering that happens today
(including wireless as you said) are actually depending quite a lot on the
generation before Gen-Y. Gen-Y can't take credit for much of anything really.
The only exception is some of the "Web 2.0" stuff.

~~~
potatolicious
The same argument can be made for any other generation - the real engineering
that happened back in the 70s for ARPANet was actually depending quite a lot
on the generation before it (transistors, dielectric research, the ENIAC and
computers that came long before them)...

My point still stands: every generation has incredibly difficult engineering
challenges to overcome. Yes, it all builds on top of each generation, but
there's no reason to denigrate the accomplishments of one generation or
another.

~~~
gaius
Then why is Gen-Y all like, we have all these amazing Interweb sK1Lz that no-
one else does? 'Cos I'm not seeing it.

------
tphyahoo
This article made me want to throttle the author, and I don't even belong to
gen y. Where's the bloody downvote button?!?!

