Millennial, or a Pain In The Ass? Gen Next — A First World Problem.
Last week, disgruntled Yelp employee Talia Jane Ben-Ora wrote an Open Letter to the CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, hitting him with a barrage of complaints about the fact that her basic wage made it impossible to live a comfortable life.
Talia’s vision was that upon graduation she’d officially be an ‘Adult’. Being an adult to Talia meant having a car, a credit card and her own apartment. At no point did her vision account for steadily climbing a career ladder, sharing a house or getting the bus. Cue bitter disappointment.
Included in her lengthy rant were complaints about the fact that she was expected to spend 12 months in a customer service role before being allowed transfer to her preferred area (media, where she presumed she could spend her days ‘making memes and twitter jokes about food’), that the all-you-can-eat snack shelves from which she consumes most of her meals wasn’t well enough stocked during the weekends, that you couldn’t take the food home and are expected to eat on site and that she has a long commute to work.
In her myriad of recommendations to the CEO, Talia suggested that customers make donations to be given to the employees in her department so they can afford Bay area rents, and that Yelp start an initiative which provides food from local homeless soup kitchens to feed its starving employees.
When she instantly (and inevitably) lost her job, she added links to her PayPal and Square Cash accounts so that compassionate and charitable readers could make donations to keep her financially afloat while she looks for another job. She wasn’t joking.
Needless to say, Talia broke the internet — with Millennial bashers coming from near and far to have their say. Her blog post has over 1000 responses, virtually all of which are berating her inflamed ego and short sightedness. Of course for the most part, their points are valid. Talia is a newly qualified graduate with little work experience on her CV so should be expected to prove her worth and work from the bottom up, right? Upon graduation, she accepted the job in Yelp (fully aware of the salary, the expectations of the role and the cost of living in San Fran) and chose to move lock, stock and barrel into her own apartment (with no housemates to help cover the costs). What was she expecting apart from a rough ride?
While I can’t disagree with much of the backlash, what I find most interesting is that those giving her grief seem to be blaming the fact that she’s a ‘Millennial’ as the problem and tarring all ‘Millennials’ with the same brush.
The Millennial generation encompasses all those born from 1982–1995, and includes me. My first job out of college painted a similar picture to Talia’s — my masters degree offered me a salary of $30K, a three hour daily commute and 60 hour work weeks where the majority of my time was spent doing mind numbing tasks like creating excel documents, editing proposals and becoming a minute-taking whizz. As would have been the case if Talia had gone the distance, it was 12 months before I heaved myself onto next rung of the ladder to a new role, better salary and healthier work life balance.
The difference, though seemingly slight, is that I did it all with a smile on my face (most days) and waited it out, all the while happily living off a diet of Pot Noodles and sharing my home (and the bills) — with a multitude of strange and unusual characters.
Talia’s actual problem, in my opinion, is the disconnect between her expectations and the reality of the time it will take to get there.
Unlike Talia, I was better able to reign in my expectations and focus my vision towards my long term goals. Is that because I’m a Mid Millennial (Gen Y) and Talia’s a Later Millennial (Gen Next)? Or is it simply because Talia’s a bit of a pain the ass and I, hopefully, am not?
I’d like to think that, regardless of what year we’re born in, we’re all individuals with unique perspectives and that our behaviours are something other than the by-product of a generational nature/nurture continuum. But then I’m prone to dreaming of a utopia and fantasising that unicorns might exist. Research centering around the working behaviours of Gen Next Millennials does point to the contrary. As gross a generalisation as this may be, two key attributes — patience and foresight — are something that many new graduates today appear to lack. They want it all, and they want it now.
Studies indicate they’re fast paced, decisive and ambitious, hungry for challenges and personal development. All great qualities. They’re also impatient, have a strong sense of entitlement and crave instant gratification. Not such great qualities. One year in the career of a Gen Next Millennial is the equivalent of five years to their generational predecessors. They refuse to be stuck in a rut — great for organisational innovation, bad for ‘paying their dues’ and working steadily towards a promotion.
So, if the issue is not that Talia is a pain the ass, but a mere mortal Millennial then the reality is that she’s not going to change. And neither are the multitude of young guns who are surging onto the jobs market and who will share similar visions and values (according to research). Despite their supposed foibles, there are countless benefits to the Gen Next Millennial employee, which companies can harness to great success if they know how to manage them effectively. But fail to pander to their seemingly outlandish demands and you may have a mutiny on your hands.
Surely then, it’s better for companies and the people who manage them now to understand how the current and upcoming generations tick and work towards a mutually beneficial relationship, rather than attempting to stuff them like square pegs into round holes? By 2020, over half the workforce will be Millennials. The operational ‘norms’, expectations and motivations of their archaic employee ancestors will be a thing of history books and bad jokes. There’ll be Millennials managing Millennials — Talia’s managing Talia’s! And they’ll be scratching their heads in wonderment at the quirks and oddities of Generation Z (those employee fledglings born between 1995 and 2015). You can’t fight progress, eh?
