I don’t usually watch videos like this, but it just came along and I gave it a view.  It’s called “Why Do Bosses HATE Working with Gen Z?” and, as a boss myself, I have often had that very same experience myself. I will link the video down below the fold if you want to take a look yourself, but I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about it.

So let’s get started.

First, of course, here’s the video:

The answer, whether they like it or not, is yes. A lot of people in Gen Z are that bad. No all, of course, but as a general class, at least those that I have encountered, they tend to be pretty bad. Why? Because they tend to have very unrealistic expectations of reality. They want things that aren’t true.

I could easily get into a long, drawn-out political and social rant, and some of that, I admit, I will have to delve into, because a lot of the problems come from the social expectations that a lot of Gen-Zers seem to have.

If you watch the beginning of the video, they talk about young people getting promoted and one word that I don’t remember ever coming up is “earn”. They talk a lot about what people “deserve”, but not about what people have “earned”. If you want to be promoted, you have to earn it. If you want to be a manager, you have to act like a manager before they give it to you. You have to show that you are capable. You don’t get it, just because you’ve bothered to show up.

The one thing these people don’t understand is that they are not in charge. They work FOR someone else. This is not a collaborative effort, at least not at the lower levels where a lot of these people seem to have problems. Management tells you to do something, you do it and they give you money for it. If you want to get ahead in the company, you go above and beyond the call of duty. You do more than they ask you for, for no other reason than to show that you can. You consistently work harder and perform better than your job description implies. That’s going to get you noticed and getting noticed tends to push you ahead.

Of course, as I’ve said before, a lot of young people these days have a bizarre fixation on payment. They don’t want to do anything that isn’t going to put money in their pocket. They don’t care about respect, they don’t care about having a good reputation, it’s all “gimme gimme gimme!” No, that’s not how this works.

Therefore, for a lot of them, the instant they don’t get their way, they just leave. When they don’t get what they want, they just up and walk out the door, no notice, no effort, and then they wonder why they don’t get good recommendations from previous employers. It’s why they have a hard time getting decent jobs, because nobody wants to hire an asshole with an attitude problem.

That’s really the issue here. It isn’t “bad employers”, it isn’t “mean bosses”, it’s idiot Gen-Zers who have no concept of the world they live in. A lot of that comes from their parents. You know, those helicopter idiots who never let their kids deal with adversity? The ones who go storming into a professor’s office, demanding to know why their legal adult offspring got a bad grade? Yeah, those imbeciles. If you never learn how to handle adversity in life, you’re not going to get very far.

“But it’s not our fault!” So what? You are adults. Time to deal. It’s not our fault that your idiot parents screwed you over. It might not be yours either, but we’re hiring you, not your parents. We don’t care about your past. If you need a therapist, go find one. Nobody has to coddle you and nobody should.

That’s the problem that a lot of these people have is that hand-holding time is over. Nobody ever showed them how to be adults, not their parents and certainly not the schools. The schools are too busy trying to teach them to be happy and happiness doesn’t matter in the real world. If  you want to eat, you work. If you want to get ahead, you work harder. You don’t throw immature hissy-fits because your employer isn’t catering to your needs.

If they’re doing something illegal, then there are remedies for that. If you’re miserable where you are and think you can do better, then by all means try. Yet we see a lot of young people just drifting from job to job to job, thinking that sooner or later, they’re going to find utopia.

Utopia doesn’t exist. Sometime, you’re going to have to buckle down and do the job you were hired to do, even if it isn’t perfect, even if you’re not having an emotional orgasm 24/7. Get to fucking work! This is why young people often have such a hard time, because nobody clued them in what to expect when they were out there on their own.

Because here’s another problem that they’re going to run into. It’s not 100% their fault, mostly, it’s something their parents did to them, but walking out of college with a piece of paper in your hand, that doesn’t mean you’re qualified for most jobs. Tons of companies won’t even look at them, piece of paper or not, because they have no actual, on-the-job experience. We need to know that you can show up when you’re supposed to and do the work that’s assigned. Your degree is a very small part of your value. If you’re not there and reliable, nobody wants you. In my generation, we worked from the time we were 16 onward. That isn’t true today.

That brings us right around to “if I’m not happy, I’ll just leave!” and then prospective employers are going to call your previous ones, find out that you were a pain in the ass, that you didn’t show up and that you just walked out the door, leaving them high and dry and you’re not going to get a second interview. Nobody wants an employee like that. It’s why so many of these people wind up in their late 20s, back living with mom and dad, because they can’t get a job and are in unbearable debt.

Whose fault is that? It’s not the employers. They are not your parents. You need to learn how to be a responsible adult and if you can’t, or you won’t, screw you.

That’s just how it goes.