May 19
2. When you were teens, X’ers witnessed adults in your lives being laid off from large corporations, as re-engineering swept through the business lexicon. This engendered in most X’ers a lack of trust in large institutions and a strong desire for a life filled with back-up plans, just in case. Many of the adults you saw laid off and then struggling to reintegrate were in their 40′s—about the age X’ers are reaching today.
Not sure I agree with all these but it is an interesting read for us X’ers.
Interesting read. I see myself fitting the profile with a few of the reasons listed.
Frankly, I think the author has missed the key point: The world does not need mega-corps at all. The day the last huge corporation goes bust or is broken into smaller, logically-related business units will be a great day for humanity.
Wait. You’re like 1 year older than me. So… I’m an “X’er”?
Huh. Never really understood what that meant.
I haven’t liked any jobs where I didn’t feel useful in something significant somehow or jobs that put me out in front of people a lot. (Sales would have been my nightmare job.)
I like the whole “men-in-black” kind of heroism in my work… they don’t know that the world was just saved from total disaster.
This article just screams ignorance to me. The author seems to be frustrated herself and wants to blame it on others and the environment she worked/started working in.
If you’re unhappy at work there are plenty of things you can do. Also if you aren’t succeeding, then you might want to take a look at yourself and stop blaming “Gen Y” or “Boomers.” Personally I’m borderline Generationally, I just don’t understand how making generalizations about a generation can be justified, someone 1 year older than me has the right to hate my generation?!?! We grew up at in the same time period, did the same things…
Well I know why I don’t like the current mega-corporate work-place in America today (and it has nothing to do with anything listed in the article).
It’s because Corporate America (as it has been labeled) has become an multi-national “rogue” of sorts, an ambiguous entity with no real affiliations to anyone or anything. The beating heart of America is quite literally in the hands of individuals with no vested interest in the well being of this country or its citizens.
The factories, the agriculture, the realestate, and significant portions of all branches of the government are all owned or controlled by multi-national entities once you look high enough up the “food chain” as it were.
Now maybe nobody else is concerned by this, but if american citizens don’t own their country…who does??
@LostSoul:
China and Saudi Arabia
I buy into some of those. I’ve been with the same company for almost 7 years now, but I am ready to leave it. I am working on my MBA, but I have to admit I want to work in Europe and get the heck out of the US for a while. “See the world” so to speak.
I can agree that loyalty isn’t a trait in many companies. I’ve given my company loyalty, but I know they would chuck me it they had a downturn…
I dunno about the listed reasons, but not too long ago my wife attended a seminar about this same topic, and told me that the speaker’s ideas boiled down to a fundamental difference between Boomers and Xers in the workplace:
Boomers, and those before them, live to work: their lives are centered around the workplace, their job gives them identity, etc.
whereas
Xers work to live: the job essentially exists in order to fuel their everyday lives.
I thought it was interesting. It certainly described me.
personally those damn commie pinkos are holding me back, damn reds
No, alot of this makes sense. Even if you are a boomer, you have to admit the world is COMPLETELY different from when you grew up, with parents or loved ones dealing with the war/etc.
The job marketplace is so crazily different from when you were at the age they are describing in the article. I think number 8 is the only one I disagree with.
I always remember that classy movie Office Space, where he says something like ‘we are not meant to live our lives in cubicles’ or some such truth. Sbloyd has it right. People SHOULD work so they can HAVE a life; don’t live to work. Only the corporation wins then, and at your mid-life crisis you will want to shoot yourself for buying into that garbage mission statement crap that so many institutions pound into your head.
Boomers were the ones who started as hippies, then kind of followed in their parent’s footsteps. Those who were their kids (born ’69) are all to aware that you can’t work one place and then retire. Too hard to do any more. We work hard and play hard. We’re also the latchkey kids, often enough, and so we’re much more self sufficient.
The next Gen – millennials, well they take their moms to interviews (no kidding. Recruiters recruit the parents as much as the kids!), and they often have the same parents as the Gen X, but after they got older and more interested in their kids’ lives. Overconfident, coddled, demanding, and expect to make six figures after high school. These are the kids with parents who argue with teachers over B’s, argue with coaches and refs over good calls against their kids, take them to 8 different activities and sports in a week (soccer moms), and who start college prep in 7th grade. They also live IT, where the Gen X learned it, Boomers overcome it, and the ‘greatest generation’ (WW2) before them are afraid of it.
It’s amazing how different each of the last 4 generations are. We did some extensive study of the generations as part of an HR class, so you knew how to adapt to each generation in terms of how to hire and recruit, expectations, and so on.
One other interesting thing. This big retirement boom the boomers are supposed to have? Its a trickle, because the boomers don’t want to retire, or fear that they will be working as Wal-Mart greeters if they don’t squeeze out just a few more years… Also they often have millennial kids, so they need to work to cover college tuition into their 60′s.
Very interesting dynamics.
Fact: I am a boomer.
Fact: I hate having to go to work each day. It’s an interruption of my life.
Fact: I hate smart-mouth MBAs who haven’t ever done anything of consequence, haven’t actually worked for years to produce something of value, but come out of college with a head full of untested (or worse, proven-wrong) ideas their professors pounded into them, and then try to change reality to match their MBA fantasy world.
Fact: I am a part-owner of the place where I am employed.
Fact: Thanks to Congress having changed the laws regarding military retirement sometime in the late 80s, I will probably never be able to retire (right now, I get military retirement pay for my 23 years of Army service, but when I turn 65, that will be taken from me, and I either have to keep working or go on Social Security – which won’t even buy cat food).
So, I have been carefully trained to give lip service to the mission statement, and I have loyalty to the company to the extent that, as part-owner, I need for the company to succeed; but absent that, and given my experience in the post-Army job marketplace, my advice is “if you get a better offer, take it, every single time.” You don’t owe the Corporation anything, and the Corporation can’t exist without thousands of faceless cogs like you.
I’m at the border where one generation ends and the other begins, so I fit in nowhere. All I know is that every job I’ve ever had was lost due to outsourcing or downsizing. I don’t expect I’ve seen the last of it, sadly.