"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates"
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
None of that sounds like a sense of entitlement to me. This is the third or fourth article I've seen on this meme. Are corporate managers really that outraged that people in their 20s want to be treated like human beings?
I can't believe they used those exact quotes, but sure enough they did.
I think the idea that young employees can be as valuable as seasoned veterans is really disruptive to people who've had to deal with the system all along. This is really prevalent among doctors (but appears to be trickling down to less prestigious jobs) -- they don't think the hours demanded as residents make sense, but they had to do it, so it only make sense.
I'm hoping that we see a big shift in the high-tech field away from big companies toward a network of small entrepreneur-driven companies that do one thing, and do it really well. Working with a network of people I trust, who are proactive and motivated to do a great job because they have skin in the game, is a real pleasure.
I think it's already happening and will increase even more as very talented people continue to get laid off for reasons outside of their direct control.
This won't happen, it's like the sweet dream of small, self-sufficient communities. Not all kinds of work can be done in such an environment.
But startup culture will inevitably do away with a lot of inane bureaucratic megacorp policies. Especially if all the trophy kids stop swallowing the bullshit. Most large organizations would be much more efficient with a different structure for incentives, and they'll start realizing it when they get hammered by others. Outraged news stories like this one is the first indication that something is happening. You aren't outraged unless you fear something.
I would say that fear is the correct word, but suggest that you have the context wrong. It's not the top eschelon of the generation running away and creating their own businesses that we fear, it's the bottom tier thinking they merit top tier salaries with no proportional abilities to go along with them. I welcome the former, and the latter gives me nightmares.
This reminds me of the 60 minutes segment on millennials which, amongst other things, accused us of being unable to use a fork and knife. I kid you not.
"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates"
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
Through my mind as I read those quotes:
"[Baby Boomers] want to be treated as superiors rather than colleagues."
"They would rescind an offer if they found something embarrassing on Facebook." (This has happened to people I know.)
"Baby boomers also expect ... others' lifestyles to be arranged for their purposes."
In any case, I'm surprised but not amazed that people are willing to say things like this. The problem is as follows: consider that a money economy is essentially a computer, designed to allocate resources to the most productive individuals and institutions; e.g. those who make the best decisions with them in the past. Of course, this process is filtered through large corporations...
Most people would agree that, unless there was a specific, well-defined goal of high potential value, working at immense sacrifice is unwise. Most higher-level corporate work is not toward a well-defined goal of value; in fact, most of it's so generic and abstract as to be pointless. But large corporations often value sacrifice over productivity, shifting the money and (much more importantly) power over to those who were most willing to sacrifice themselves. What does this mean? Well, becoming a "company man" in a large company, with all the personal sacrifices that entails, is actually often a bad decision. Thus, decision-making power is allocated to those who made bad decisions (about the relative value of their personal existence vs. corporate goals) in the past. In large big-box companies, power shifts to the defective rather than the productive. Hmm. That definitely wasn't supposed to happen.
This article is the voice of Baby Boomers who made bad decisions with their lives and, out of regret and reflective bitterness, have chosen to chide those who wish to explore other options, falling back on a "because I said so" attitude. People veer toward authoritarianism when under psychological stress, and that's exactly what we see in this article.
Your argument above seems to miss at least one thing. A corporation wants to reward people who value the company. At the upper eschelons, they may reward people for independent thinking, but in most cases, people are hired to perform a job to meet a corporate goal. I recently had to reprimand a person because she missed a client meeting to attend Junior Achievement. I praise her for her efforts with that organization, but it doesn't pay her $100K salary, and my organization does. It's not that any of these ideals being mentioned are terrible, it's the juxtapostion of "I want salary X" and "I'm going to wear offensive t-shirts to work because I'm expressing myself" and "I want to take off time whenever I want".
Having compared many fortune 500 companies, I can tell you that at a company with flex-time in place, it's hard to schedule meetings for a 20 person team. Effectively 2 days out of a 5 day work week were "unavailable" and therefore lost. I love flex time. Love it. But I can also point out the very real reasons why a company would not be able to support it. So there's a lot of trade off and I think it's killing our ability to be competitive.
Power shifting to the defective is more a matter of the Peter Principle than any person's ability to separate personal time from corporate time.
"They want to be treated like colleagues rather than subordinates"
"They would renege on a job-acceptance commitment if a better offer came along."
"Millennials also expect ... time for their family and personal interests."
None of that sounds like a sense of entitlement to me. This is the third or fourth article I've seen on this meme. Are corporate managers really that outraged that people in their 20s want to be treated like human beings?