I have to echo my comment earlier. When you say that young people want to be judged on the quality of the work (only), you're turning your work into a commodity and making it easier and easier for your work to be outsourced.
I don't mean quality strictly in the sense of workmanship I mean the the sense of the value it provides to the company, including things like efficiency, productivity, etc.... I also disagree that judging on quality would make the jobs more susceptible to outsourcing. Presumable oppisite is judging on chair sitting ability and since I'm 100% sure the one thing that cheap over seas labor has me beat on is their chair sitting skillz I choose to compete in all the other categories.
A fair point. If you have the talent, definitely avoid any job that can be commoditized. I think there may be as much as a 50/50 split between people who will be able to do so and those who cannot, so those in the bottom face some harsh realities. What I'm also finding, though is that a very large portion of the people I work with aren't able to accurately assess their capabilities. They're ready to be entrepeneurs with no math skills, for example. This is an obvious concern. I think that's why the article resonated with so many who read it on both sides of the fence.
Newspapers are supposed to print news, not print platitudes. :) I recommend you take at least a moment to wonder why your generation is coming under fire so much.
I do feel entitled to get talented employees. But if I cannot get them, I look at the cheepest way to solve my problems, and I turn the work into a commodity. As soon as I do that, I look for the person willing to perform the work for the lowest price, and that isn't likely to be a millenial in the US.
The reason I don't see myself as having and attitude of "entitlement" is that I feel you have every right to look elsewhere. If you don't like my terms and conditions, you are not obligated to meet them. I don't have trouble finding work with flexible conditions and a good salary - so when I previous employer tried to change those terms, I quit. But if I hadn't been able to find a new job, I wouldn't have complained - my employer has the right to say "take it or leave it", and I have the right to "leave it". Anything else is just complaining (provided I have the legal right to "leave it", which is why I'm irritated with the H1B terms, which uses non-market mechanisms to undermine the basic contract of a free market democracy).
Now, ahem, best of luck with that low, low price outsourcing deal.
I think that the word choice subordinates was unfortunate, in this case. But basically when you work for a person, you are their subordinate.
There's definitely something weird going on with the people I've worked with lately. Despite having only a few years experience they're perfectly willing to commandeer a meeting. The enthusiasm is great. The initiative is excellent. But the content they provide is sub-par. So somewhere there is a gap between "taking initiative" and "knowing what you're talking about and then taking initiative" and that's kind of my problem with the workforce I face.
It's not so much subordinate in the sense of "respect my authority" as it is "please when you're speaking in front of the board and I kick you under the table... SHUT UP"
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.
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.
I know I've probably made a lot of people on this board a little irked, but I'm serious when I say I'm worried about how we'll compete.