We had a meeting today about how to recruit and work with millennials

45? I didn't know Gen-Xers were that old. Geeze.

OP, has your company considered changing your vacation and sick day policies? Do you have social media use policies in place?

We have social media policies in place. There have been no discussions, at least by the mgmt. team, about vacation and sick day policies. I think I know why you ask.

I'm on the oldest end of the millinnial spectrum and I've worked in supervisory positions over the past several years. Millinnials require constant validation and often they see themselves as being more awesome than they truly are. However, they're not hard to figure out and some bullshit grifter isn't going to provide legitimate insight into their hearts and minds.

By the way, baby boomer women are the worst to work with.

A millenium couple moved into my building, which is a co-op that has house rules. They are constantly doing shit like throwing cigarettes off the roof and seem intent on breaking every rule. Every time they get busted they run around complaining that the board is awful, mean and negative. It's fun and sad to watch...it makes me fear for when they run the world.

There's a lot of talk like this about Millennials - but I don't think they're really any different than others in their 20s, expecting a lot fast but then have life kick you in the face.

How does one become a "millennial expert"?

It's like "Who Moved My Cheese" all over again. Show up, do your job, learn how to work with other people who aren't like you and adapt as needed. Why is it so hard?

[quote]Show up, do your job, learn how to work with other people who aren't like you and adapt as needed. Why is it so hard?

Unfortunately, for many of these delicate flowers, it is more like: Arrive when you feel like it, demand other people accommodate your special needs while criticizing everyone for not being inclusive, and throw in your two cents, because your opinions that are unencumbered by facts, logic, or reason, matter.

R7 - yeah, that's hard to swallow - a "millenial expert". Good God. How can you take that seriously?

I'm glad I'm retired.

Millennial Expert...is that like Autism Expert?

Let me also add - why should the work world change because of Millenials? The job market isn't THAT great - you can replace people relatively easily.

It's not like the companies are going to die if they don't completely change everything to accommodate these special flowers.

If you want to find and keep talented employees, sometimes companies have to adjust. I see nothing wrong with that. I just find the neediness so strange. But they were raised by baby boomers, which explains a great deal.

We're smarter and better-educated than you, and we WILL outlast you...despite your attempts to shut us out of the workforce. Simple biology will assert itself, once you are too broken-down to kowtow to your corporate overlords, and we will take the positions you can no longer maintain. And perhaps we will reverse the subservience that strangled the labor movement in the USA. Because we realize we are human, and have rights. Because we know just how badly our boomer parents screwed us over, we are not content with a mere paycheck; we want the benefits our parents had. It's not greed, it's self-preservation.

Oh, christ. I remember when I was in college-in the mid 80's- watching a film in class about how our generation was so awful and didn't respect anything or anyone and had to be constantly prodded to stay on task and the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, and, and.

R12 some companies won't die, but some will. I work with clients who still fax handwritten requests in chicken scratch because they refuse to learn how to work the online system. Some of them even snail mail requests. What kind of service model is that in 2015?

Sometimes the stodgy old companies need fresh blood to make them realize how outdated some of their business models are. You know, like 100 years ago when all those delicate flowers got together and demanded weekends off?

Oh god I hate these kids. I got written up at work on Sunday because I told a kid who came into work hungover, smelling like he just rolled out of the club, probaly still drunk and was taking a nap on broke down boxes in the surg supply room that he was in no shape to do his job and he should clock out and go home. Somehow that got turned into I was picking on him. The little fuckweasle actually used those words,. HR didn't want to hear that he was drunk or a liability if he actually did any work. All they cared about is if I told him he was in no shape and to go home and what tone of voice I used when I said it.. I half expected him to call his mommy and have her come down and yell at me.

Then today one of the girls got caught darting all over the place taking selfies next to the drug supplies, in surgical suites, the men's locker room and laying next to post-op patients. The only thing that happened was she had to erase the pictures. No mention will go in her record either. If anyone would have tried that a few years ago they would have been fired and not been able to find work in the med field.

Fuckin special little snowflakes.

R4, what have you noticed about boomer women? In my experience the ones in management are toxic, backstabbing, manipulative bitches.

Dear me, R14, I can't tell if you're real or not but if you truly believe what you wrote I hope you wear depends or a diaper because you're going to shit yourself a lot when you meet the real world.

I'm getting out of HR because I don't want to spend the rest of my career dealing with this. I don't need their bullshit. Kate McKinnon fucking nailed this generation on SNL this weekend. "Where's the nap room?". One of my employees told me she needs (not wants... needs) a 90 minute lunch break because she needs clarity in the middle of the day and yoga clears her mind. She doesn't really eat lunch because it's better to have several small meals throughout the day so this is more of a 'wellness break'. She thinks a wellness break would make her more productive. Fuck this shit. I'm out.

R14, sounds like you could use a wellness break.

Their parents constantly told them everything they did was perfect. So, it was a situation where the parents constantly lied to their children.

I'm a late boomer/gen Xer, and I'm fine with people trying to make the workplace more flexible and human friendly. I don't care if people take naps or do yoga or play games, bring babies or pets to the office, as long as the work gets done fast, well, and they're reliable. The problem I have with millennials is them always being on their phones texting or watching something, instead of working. They can't focus for two minutes without looking at their phones. And yeah, they also think I'm there to be their therapist. I don't want to hear it. And no, I'm not giving you a fucking hug.

For real, R20? Is she salaried? Say yes and pro-rate her pay.

>"Their parents constantly told them everything they did was perfect."

Early 30s (tail end of the "millennial" generation, I guess) here and a lot of these entitled behaviors sound pretty alien to me. Times like these I'm almost grateful my parents were abusive narcissists

R20 started her career by kicking out all the competent and professional mature workers, so we are not too sad for r20

Fortunately where I work, employees have to have experience and actually work.

Millennios? Milenni-no.

[R14] mommy and daddy always told him he was the greatest and he really believes it.

R1 apparently failed math. Basic addition and subtraction stumps him. 1970 + 45 = 2015. Or is R1 just proud of his ignorance? It's generally known that Gen X was born roughly between the mid-60s and the mid-80s. Is this just a person who loved mocking "old people?" The lack of self awareness is interesting, certainly. "Look at me, I'm being snarky, Gen Xers are old people hahaha." You actually sound profoundly dumb.

Why must the millennials be coddled and catered to? And why do they need to be recruited? When I graduated I had to hit the pavement to get a job. I hear from other sources that this generation faces a job shortage and difficulty getting hired with just a bachelor's degree. Why does any company feel they need special measures to attract this group? Why not just post the job and only hire the competent and hard-working ones? If there are so many of them looking and so few jobs, surely the best with stand out from the crowd.

Why actively recruit hires who require what amounts to staff-wide sensitivity training? They're YOUNG PEOPLE, not foreigners, minorities or the disabled. It's just so absurd. This generation seems to be literally driving us insane as a society. I sound like my parents but honest to god, when I was young you had to actually work to get a job, keep it and make a living.

Can you imagine the children they'll raise? By the time R1 and I get to the nursing home they'll be having training for the patients on how to treat and care for the staff. God help us.

Old elementary teacher here. About midway in my career, pedagogy was overtaken with "building self esteem" and positive affirmation. This meant constant praise for everything, making achievements out of mundane events, certificates, rewards, etc. I tried to avoid this as much as possible. Kids know when they have success, it is not necessary to create a false climate. I was always very warm and positive with my students, tried to create an atmosphere that recognized real effort not just the end result. However,parents hovering over kids from the toddler years on bleating "good job" every time a child ate a meal or just did as asked demanded more of this at school. Over time this became the norm for middle class and affluent students. Not their fault that they are special snowflakes, they were made that way. A colleague once made the unforgivable error of referring to a child as an average math student during a parent conference. The outraged parent went from principal to superintendent complaining that her child was in no way average and how dare that teacher attack her child that way. The teacher was forced to write a letter of apology to the parent, which the parent promptly circulated among the other parents. Typical.

O-k. Aren't most of the high tech, ruling-SF, code-writing, etc., workers millennials? And don't they, by nature of their job, work VERY hard? Ballet dancers? Actors, singers, dancers on Bway? How about on a farm? I "heart" and empathize with all the postings above - is too easy for me, out of the work force (disabled) for eight years, but I think there's a lot of over-reacting going on. EXCEPT: the poster talking about 2 hideous-sounding employees in what sounds like - a hospital? That's terrible; YOUR bosses should be fired.

I'm a parent of two Millenial sons (born '85 and '86) and neither they, nor their friends are "special snowflakes". By and large, they are hard-working young professionals with a good, solid work-ethic. I'm not saying that this nonsense doesn't exist but I suspect that they were born in the 90s to Gen-Xers, who were even more ignored as children than Baby Boomers. There could well be a split in the Millenial generation as there is in the Baby Boomers (Vietnam draft vs non-draft age).

We don't hire useless Millennials, since they are too busy doing stupid and useless crap on their phones all day long. They're idiots, and I hope cell phones give you cancer.

Actually, I hope all Millenniald die soon. Take away their phones and they cannot function. Probably most of the dicklickers here are the same. You people are brainwashed idiots with your stupid phones.

[quote]We're smarter and better-educated than you.

Oh, my sides. Although it's no fault of your own, your generation received the worst education in decades. You do realize that standardized tests have had to be repeatedly dumbed down so your generation can get comparable scores to mine. You may have had easier access to information due to the Internet, but as a rule, your grasp of the concepts and fundamentals of just about every discipline are facile at best, and ludicrous in most cases.

Colleges now have to spend a couple years in remedial education just to compensate for what you didn't learn in jr. high and high school. You are better at typing with your thumbs.

why do we need special meeting dedicated to millennials? are they the new retarded?

[quote]There's a lot of talk like this about Millennials - but I don't think they're really any different than others in their 20s, expecting a lot fast but then have life kick you in the face.

I'm GenX, and the kids my peers and I knew like this were regarded as fuckups who were their parents' cross to bear.

R33 and R34 describe the problem perfectly.

Millennials may have immediate access to a wealth of information but they don't possess the ability to process any of it. There is no downtime for them to formulate thoughts and ideas. Whereas previous generations would kill time, daydream, or ruminate while walking, riding on the subway, or waiting for their food to arrive, millennials put their face in their phone every chance they get, even while waiting to cross the street (that is, if they haven't been looking at their phone intently while walking down the street in the first place). They can't even carry on face-to-face conversations without obsessively reaching for their phones.

Sherry Turkle of MIT wrote an interesting, if disturbing article on last Sunday's NYT about the decline in basic social skills among young people due to their obsession with their phones.

Great piece, R37. Thanks.

While I don't disagree about millenials having their faces planted in their phones, I see a lot of this in older guys too (Gen X especially). You go out to a bar and see these guys on Grindr or whatever.

You are correct R39. I am 58 and my partner is 43 and I am constantly aggravated by the amount of time he spends on his phone while we are out to dinner or in a bar.

R1, the oldest Gen-Xers are 51. Take Keanu Reeves.

As a "middle-of-the-Boom" boomer, I'm probably older than most of you. I agree with the posters who decry Millennials (and older, as mentioned above) being buried in their damn phones all the time, but isn't this just part of time marches on? Smart phones aren't going to disappear, are they? All of these things are only annoying - in RELATION to (something else.) I was very close to my aunt (died 12 years at age 80); she was very sharp till she died; shopped for herself as a youngish widow (43) to one year before her death, supermarkets, blah, blah, BUT: she used to piss and moan sometimes about how much easier it USED to be, when you just went to a neighborhood store, placed your order; the grocer (or assistant, I suppose) got everything off the shelves FOR you. I sympathized but couldn't really understand; was well before my time. The next thing - already here? is - watches, right? "smart" watches? (I'm probably not using the right term, old as I am.)

Next: We're all going to be robots, maybe??!

Three of the 20 somethings I work with bring their support dogs to work. Two of them are men, I shit you not. The men claim it is PTSD from the armed services but they were never deployed overseas, they were accountants. So we have three adorable Golden Retrievers attached to these loonies. I heard a visitor say "Do you have a lot of blind people working here?". The answer was " No they're mentally impaired"

R4 and R18, I agree about Boomer women, but I would limit it mostly to women in management on up to executive levels, and obviously not all Boomer women in these positions are like this. But boy, there sure are a lot of them! As a general rule, they are indeed as R18 wrote; toxic, backstabbing, and manipulative. The Gen-X women are on a whole better (but still some nasty pieces of work among them, too) and had to learn how to network with these dysfunctional bitches as part of women's groups. Boomer men are generally all part of the good old boy network and don't like to let gay men in to that club. They help out their buddies in the club no matter how incompetent they are, which is just infuriating. Gen-X men are some of the best managers/executives I've had, but some assholes among them, too, especially if they vote Republican.

R7, I agree with you when you wrote, "Show up, do your job, learn how to work with other people who aren't like you and adapt as needed. Why is it so hard?" I remember when I was a supervisor at my first job out of college, I had three just plain evil women (two Boomers and one Gen-X) who played the most ridiculous head games. No matter how awful they were to me, my team always had the best morale, best stats, etc. They were constantly shifting my team around but it still came out on top. It got to a point where people were asking to be transferred to my team.

One of the evil bitches finally came to me and asked what I was doing to get my team to post such good numbers and be so happy. I said I thought it was pretty simple; as supervisor, my attitude was that it was my job to get out of the way of my people and let them do their job, praise them when they did a good job, come down on them if they were making too many mistakes or blowing off work, help them when they need it, make them figure out things for themselves if they were being lazy, and try to take as much off extra distracting stuff off their plate as I could so they could focus on doing their main jobs well. She said there was no way it could be that simple. It was that simple and still is. Why do corporations always have to overthink this?

As to Millennials, I do applaud their attempt to get back some rights for workers, but some of the petty stuff they want just distracts from that (LOL at nap rooms in the SNL skit!). I work with a few who have turned out to be good workers, but as a whole I'm surprised at the entitlement they have and their inability to think independently and solve problems. As someone wrote above, they take in a lot of information but don't seem to know how to process and analyze it effectively. They also tend to be lousy at taking criticism. When I have to re-write something they fucked up, they go to the ends of the earth to defend their shitty work product. Overall, I'd prefer more good results from Millennial workers and fewer excuses.

Eldergay thread.

Fuck you, r45. You're EVERYTHING that's wrong with the world today. EVERYTHING.

"How does one become a "millennial expert"? "

Basically, stick your head up your ass and tweet it.

I dunno. I'm 61 and would LOVE a nap room.

I'm so glad I retired early. I couldn't deal with these entitled little pricks without cunt-punting them.

There's Something About Kevin.

Oops, I meant "We Need To Talk About Kevin"

Keep in mind the women boomers in management positions are the ones that had to fight and claw their way to that office. It is this group that started breaking the glass ceiling and made it a little easier for Gen-X and millennial women. Women still aren't fully equal to men in the workplace today.

The shit that boomer women with ambition had to go through in the workplace is what made them toxic...they learned everything they know from equally toxic men.

A female boss told me "This is a good company to work for, but all the stuff coming, they want to be paid back - in blood"

God she was right - it was HARD work.

Still I conside her my mentor and teacher. And have used her advice to this day...

I blame millennials, but I also blame the spineless pussies who indulge them. it's one thing for your mommy and daddy to wipe your ass until you're 18, but when you're being paid a salary, you work. and if you don't do your job, you get fired. why are companies indulging this shit?

The sad thing, R54, in some fields like PR, Marketing and IT, the millenials hold all the cards because it is wrongly thought that young blood is better (and much, much cheaper).

I have a friend who worked for a PR agency as social media became mainstream for corporate PR. The agency brought on all these millenials and started to let the Xers and boomers go. My friend, a middle of the pack Xer, was let go for being "too negative" when he was actually being a realist.

The agency's reputation has declined over the last few years. They are known now for not meeting deadlines, no creativity or critical thinking (when it's too out of the box thinking, it's call absurd). It's sad, because it used to be an agency known for delivering sound, strategic corporate PR advise and the ability to execute the plan.

every other day there's a thread to complain about millennials, the way I see it, it's the management's fault (people YOUR age) for not hiring qualified people and for not caring if they actually do their jobs and for not building up work ethics in new recruits.

there are terrible employees of all ages. a 40/50 year old man interviewed me for a position, I thought it'd be in the company we were in, turns out he has his own business and uses the comapny's office during working hours to conduct his own business. and so does my 50something cousin who works in the city hall.

another 40/50 man works with my sister as the HRIS head and he gets paid by a HRIS manufacturing company to always contact them and use their terrible expensive software instead of newer, better and cheaper software.

50/60 year old medical consultants only accept the sons and daughters of their acquaintances as residents in their departments (public hospitals)

honestly there are a lot of terrible people in so many different ways, the reason you focus on us is because you're getting old and bitter.

Great rant, R56. Congratulations on distracting yourself from tumblr long enough to spew it.

R25, you sound like a Gen-Xer.

R44, I wish I had a manager like you. I'm quitting my job and leaving in 5 weeks. It cannot be soon enough. Stayed 4 years at this dump.

In my org I have 4 Millennials and roughly 45 people of Gen X and older. I would fire everyone one of the Gen X+ and replace them with Millennials if I could get away with it.

R56 is right, actually.

"Because we know just how badly our boomer parents screwed us over"

Poor R14, can I kiss it and put a Scooby-Doo Band-Aid on it?

What's a Scooby-Doo? Is that like Planking?

Was there a discussion about how these twats need to bring their "emotional support" animals to work? Or the necessity of providing "trigger warnings" so as not to upset these delicate, precious snowflakes?

Make sure ALL these special, unique millennials get a trophy for just showing up at work today! We must not damage thier fragile psyche by hurting thier feelings or defeating thier self esteem.

I am a 45 yo gen x-er and manage 2 millennials. Luckily both work hard and are pretty on top of their jobs. There are some quirks: the need for constant reinforcement, the wanting a review every 6 months, their attention to detail is the pits! I know how much worse it can be so I'll manage them the way that works for them - It is exhausting though.

I am gen X and I think millennials get a bad reputation because their shit is in our face non stop in a way not seen before.

I don't get why so many gen X pretend the entitlement thing and trophy for all wasn't already creeping in when we grew up in the 70s & 80s...

I also don't get why baby boomers don't realize they are the ones who created the situation since they served as parents, teachers, coaches, and judges for these youngsters...

I work at a university. Young people today (18-20-year-olds) act like high schoolers, and dysfunctional high schoolers at that. Sometimes I wonder if I don't work in junior high or middle school.

Most baby boomers are too old to be the parents of millennials. The boomers would more likely be grandparents than parents. Most boomers were born between 1948 and 1965 with the bulk of them born in the fifty's.

People born in the 50s were certainly having babies in the mid 80s & early 90s

We've been through this on another thread, R68. Some of the older Boomers, or those who got married young, are parents of Gen-Xers. I was born in 1955, at the middle of the Baby Boom, and my kids are Millennials, born in 1985 and 1989, and that was by no means unusual. Unless you grew up in Podunk, Iowa, you weren't in a hurry to get married and have kids. Women went to college, got jobs and used birth control. The Millennial kids I know have careers in finance, real estate, education, tech and law. Some of them have student debt and some had trouble getting jobs after the 2008 recession. I'm sure there are a few special snowflakes, but every generation has its share of misfits and losers and the older generation loves to complain about them, but it's not the majority.

R70 I was born in 1950 so I guess if I had kids they would be Gen x. I kind of agree with some of the millennials complaints, especially when it comes to the environment. We are not leaving them a healthy planet.

27 year old here, fairly sure I'm considered a millenial (why did it go from being gen Y to millenial anyway?) and I don't really see myself or many other people my age that I know who come across the typical way we are presented.

At one of my last jobs I was the youngest person in the team by a few years and I was probably the one that got the most shit done. I don't know how much the gender divide plays into things, but I was also the only male. The women, one of whom was in her early 40s and acted like a 13 year old, would constantly be avoiding work, needing help and constantly dragging others into their issues. I tried to keep my head down and focus on what I was doing, where I saw problems I fixed them, only issue was that the place was so small you couldn't actively avoid these parasitic people and their dramas. I don't need excess praise for good work, just simple acknowledgement. Somehow though, being proactive and fixing problems would see me chastised. If anything that experience told me not to try, do the bare minimum that is needed and stick to the status quo or else other people will feel threatened.

I don't understand why a company would need a specialist to tell you how to recruit younger people. Just treat us like humans and the rest should all fall into place.

[quote]I don't understand why a company would need a specialist to tell you how to recruit younger people.

One that will go bankrupt in five years.

Some of you millennial critics, as well as millennials themselves, are blaming boomer parents. I don't buy this. I blame compulsory and higher education. They indulged this shit and let young people not only get away with it, but succeed ad be rewarded. If some 24 year old is showing up to a professional job and insisting on nap hour and affirmation, its because they got away with that shit in other public forums, not the family.

R74: the problem with that analysis is that the boomers also dominated the education of millennials. They were probably at least half of their teachers and coaches. In addition, boomers most certainly dominated the administrations on campus and the district level personnel creating that environment...

Not a problem. When I say I blame schools doesn't necessarily mean only the teachers. It was precisely this idea among administrators and elected purstrings that somehow the student is a customer and his/her needs, and maybe the parents' needs, are to be serviced . The cold truth is that mediocrity and subpar work and thinking should be called out and not rewarded no matter how much the student and his parents' object.

pursestrings

Are you saying that boomers are not the majority of the administrators who made those 'business decisions' on campuses across America during the last 2 decades?

Are you saying gen X did this on their 20s & 30s?

I agree that Boomer women are the WORST. Bitter, backstabbing, micro-managing petty cunts. Boomer men are either cool or douchebags.

Im ok blaming it on "boomer administrators" in your frame of argument. I don't think this lies principally on parents. I think it lies on schools and their set up the last 20 years.

I'm happy to help you wok with millennials.

I'll echo above - baby boomer men are all about the boys club, which means exclusion of gays. I've met a few good ones - but many are total Republican douchebags who also have a poor view of women. Boomer women had to put up with all this shit - so yes, some are protective and a pain in the ass. They didn't create the climate.

I'm a Gen X- and we had a nap room in some of our corporate offices in 2000. I view the Millenial requests as more of a reflection of societal trends - people who've been at their jobs for 15-20 years don't advocate for change. This could be a good thing.

My view on Millenials is still waiting to be formed. There are some really great kids - and others that just need more focus and get off of their phones. I still feel like Millenials have less assholes in their generation.

There's less homophobia and racism but the need for constant entertainment/distraction can be grating.

I wonder if the "addicted to cell phone" thing will pass with the next generation. Will the children of Millennials think that being on your cell phone and texting constantly is outdated and something only "older" (so to speak) people do, the way that my Gen X generation views reading newspapers and writing checks at the store? It'll be interesting to see.

Had dinner alone in a NYC midtown restaurant. Millennial blond chick came in texting. Of course, she was playing with her hair tucking it behind her ears. Soon joined by a bearded young stud in work boots and with a large travel bag, which the waiter had to move eventually to get it out of the aisle. Don't know if he was a blind date or family friend but she got very excited sitting opposite him. Played with her hair a lot and twitchy body movements and her voice got very loud. Lots of "likes" , "my mom" and "my dad" which that awful rising inflection. They ordered a bottle of beer each and drank it out of a glass and not directly from a bottle. When the food came, they joined hands and prayed!

And, in my coop, there's a rental apartment upstairs where the new millennial ugly chick had 6 friends over at 2:20 AM last Saturday AM. Lots of door slamming as they came and went until 5AM and I could hear them yelling up there. Had to call the doorman who begrudgingly called up there and he was met with the response: "Yeah, we've been told we're loud, but we'll try to keep it down."

I hate all of them and they are everywhere in NYC today.

I've heard more straight masculine french MALE millennials with rising inflection. Seems to be a global plague.

I wonder how much esteem-based parenting is responsible for difficult millennials.

My sister, who's plenty smart in a lot of ways, was into that and her son was fast becoming a great big whiny diva. I was standing next to his dad when we were watching the kid playing at a playground and being a fussy little nightmare.

His dad said, "My son is a wimp." And things changed real fast. It wasn't like boot camp for kids, but lots of the coddling, negotiating, etc., went out the window.

And the kid turned out quite well. He got into a great college, graduated on time while playing d-1 baseball there for a couple years, is in a great grad school, doesn't come across like a special-snowflake brat.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I'll always suspect he wouldn't have ended up doing so well if his dad hadn't made some major parenting changes.

R87, I do know a Millennial who is like that. He's a friend of my son's and he's regarded by his friends as a pathetic loser. He's a nice guy, but he smokes weed all day and has never had a real job (he's 31 and still dreaming about breaking into the music industry). The fact that his parents are both psychologists tells you all you need to know about his upbringing.

To be fair, every generation probably has people like that. My mother had a friend with a son who would be in his 60s now. He never held a job, lived at home where he was doted on by his mother, who thought he was a genius. She gave him money to invest (wonder how that worked out) and bought him a horse!

Less racism, perhaps - about the homophobia: still as potent as ever among working-class and working-middle-class kids.

Remember when everything was good?

R17, don't you have a union? I hope your reprimand wasn't in writing.

R85, that behavior you describe has been around a LONG time; I'm well over 50 and have seen tons of women twirl their hair. And young people have been making noise in apts for fuckingEVER.

R90, yes. For the boomers: when they were young. For the "lost generation" when they were young. For the "greatest generation": when the were young. For Generation X: when they were young.

See where I'm going with this, ASSHOLES?!?!

Gen X here. Having worked with a lot of millennials, I've come to some general conclusions about that age cohort compared to Xers, Boomers, etc.:

Positive: They push for a work/life balance that used to be more standard; they don't have nearly as many hangups about LGBT stuff; they tend to be more positive than cynical; they're much more volunteer-minded; and the smart ones are REALLY smart and easy to pick out.

Negative: They expect rapid work advancement regardless of achievement; they don't understand why their thoughts or opinions may not be as valued as those of someone who has been working at a job for decades; they crumble or get surly at the slightest or most constructive criticism; their sense of humor is deliberately twee/childish; and worse than anything, they have almost no common sense.

The common-sense thing is the most frustrating, because their parents never taught it to them. In my building, we had a young twentysomething girl, out on her own for the first time, who left her bike in the common area, unlocked, every night (the common area was unlocked, too). It took a couple of months, but the bike finally was stolen. Her response was to hand-write a long, angry, "Mean People Suck!" letter to the bike thief and tape it to the wall. The fact that she bore some responsibility for not locking the bike never crossed her mind.

R94, one can only hope that more things happen to that girl and similarly idiotic "grown children." Ha, fucking ha. DOn't have too much sympathy for all the getting ridiculously drunk and calling "rape", horseshit on colleges, either.

R94, Boomer here. I remember I had to learn a lot about how to live as a young adult, sometimes by negative example. The hardest, most costly one to learn, of which I have to keep reminding myself, is never pay for anything in full from a tradesman or other worker if the work isn't completed because it is the rare man that returns to finish the incidentals if they've already been paid in full.

Never be pressured by a limited time offer. Walk away when they pull that shit.

Read the contract before signing. Even when they tell you that nobody bothers to read the contract before signing. This one is tricky because of course I don't read the bazillion "user agreements" I get for online access for everything from Amazon, to the weather, to Facebook, to Zillow.

And lock your bike in the storeroom, even though it's still a simple matter to break a lock in an unlocked and isolated storeroom.

They've become the Ben Franklin Generation.

R94 has nailed it:

Negative: They expect rapid work advancement regardless of achievement; they don't understand why their thoughts or opinions may not be as valued as those of someone who has been working at a job for decades; they crumble or get surly at the slightest or most constructive criticism; their sense of humor is deliberately twee/childish; and worse than anything, they have almost no common sense.

Reading a contract in full is a necessity. Like the above poster, I got burned a couple of times in my early 20s but I learned greatly from it.

R98 then how have they amassed so much wealth, at such a young age?

[quote] They ordered a bottle of beer each and drank it out of a glass and not directly from a bottle.

What is so bad about that?

Stop DEFACTO - Stop bumping 5 year old threads!