I know someone who is very, very smart about how companies in Silicon Valley in particular, and high tech companies in general, staff projects and positions. Her name is Rene Siegel and I'm very fortunate to count her as a friend.
Recently, Rene explained to me a phenomena she's observed that there's a generation gap in the high tech workforce. Baby Boomers have constently soldiered on. Then along came generation X and the bursting of the dot.com bubble. GenX hied it back to college to pick up the MBA and let the economy sort itself out.
Then, the Millennial's showed up and if GenX was a bit different from the Baby Boomers, then let's put an medium-sized exponent next to the Millennial. And what's fascinating is that Paul Carr, himself a millennial, has penned a scathing observation of his kin.
Academics have studied this stuff. Research by Paul Harvey, assistant professor of management at the University of New Hampshire, found that Millennials as a whole “have unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback… managers are finding that younger employees are often very resistant to anything that doesn’t involve praise and rewards.”
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There was a time when society would react with horror at the prospect of an entire generation of such whiny, spoilt little brats. For some unfathomable reason, though, instead of condemning this army of latter-day Veruca Salts, we’ve decided to pander to them.
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Inevitably, this culture of entitlement has seeped through to product development. Last month at Disrupt, I had an on-stage argument with the creators of “Gripe”, an app which allowed (as I put it) “self entitled new media douchebags” to bully front-line employees of stores, bars, hotels and restaurants into acceding to their every entitled whim. If the employee refuses to comply with whatever demands the customer makes, the app allows them to be shamed – by name – across Twitter, Facebook and every other social network. The ultimate Millennial app. [more]
