Another baby boomer has written an “old woman yells at cloud” thinkpiece, blaming the decline of the workforce on millennials’ “obliviousness.”
This time, it’s Sandy Hingston at Philadelphia. Weird name choices and a reluctance to accept hierarchy in the workforce has Hingston concerned about “how millennials are ruining the workforce.”
Part of the blame is due to how they were raised.
“It’s technology that’s skewing the picture, of course,” she writes. “My generation was raised on stories and myths about people who trudged their way through the ranks to positions of power … Millennial fairy tales are all about disrupters, the young Jacks who slay the old, slow giants.”
Like previous writers who waded into the “millennials doom America” genre, criticism against her was swift.
As Paige Gross noted in The Temple News, “But what that tells me about my generation, a concept that doesn’t seem to resonate with many of the nine-to-five adults who tell me I’ll never make any money as a journalist, is that we want to enjoy the life that we have—even if it doesn’t fit the conventions that were given to us by those who blindly followed.”
Generational changes aren’t well-liked by the outgoing generation. The standards, expectations, and values of the baby boomers will seem best to them, and it’s doubtful that they’ll change for millennials, those petulant and coddled kids. It’s easy to find excess among millennials, especially with social media. Entire media publications are dedicated to outrageous antics that attract views to fuel anger or confirmation bias. It’s pretty easy to do it for baby boomers as well. If everyone had a smartphone at Woodstock, for instance, the boomers might have more humility when lecturing younger colleagues.
Hingston isn’t all wrong, though. “People who know more get to say more. People who don’t know squat are supposed to watch and learn,” she writes. Millennials should learn on the job. Not trusting anyone over 30 is brash, as boomers should know. Brashness, though, has its place. Passionate and precocious millennials should be an asset for a company, not an annoyance to be fixed.
If companies can’t parlay those traits into something productive and valuable, the fault lies with them, not millennials. The competitive job market, not to mention the higher education system they dealt with before finding a job, is prime for exuberance and experimentation. If boomers have to knock down millennials a peg every so often, that should be a sign of a healthy generation. A listless, shirking young populace would be worse.
