Older Adults Are Sharing Their Honest Thoughts About Working With People Under The Age Of 35

“This is not true of most of the under-30 crowd; I’ve worked with plenty of great kids. However, in the last eight years, I’ve had to train several young adults who just cannot take direction without assuming you’re trying to change them on some fundamental level.”

“I’ve been in supervisory and training positions for twenty-five years and had never heard someone tell me, ‘I don’t like doing it that way,’ and when I tell them they have to, they accuse me of, ‘trying to make them do things my way.’

It ain’t my way, kid, it’s the way it’s done here, it’s the way I was also taught to do it. It’s like they have no concept that work isn’t free time and that they’re a part of a team (or what being a part of a team even means). It blows my mind, and I still haven’t figured out a way to train these kids. They often end up feeling oppressed and out of place and end up leaving or just getting fired for not learning how to do work.”

—u/thereal8symbols

“I’m in a supervisory role with mostly millennials on my team, and I’m here to tell you that it has been a learning process. Let me say I’m not a person who thinks millennials or even Gen Z sucks; quite the opposite. I love that they have priorities that differ from my own; it keeps some of my quasi-Boomer tendencies in check. That being said, I have had to continue to change my expectations drastically from what was expected of me on my way up.”

“I’ve tried so many different ways to get and keep people engaged, from sharing revenue to paid time off, and have been met with disappointment along the way. We as a generation have been accused of creating a sense of entitlement in our children because we over-compensated for our free-range upbringing by being helicopter parents who never missed a child’s activity, and that may be a fair assessment.

A balance has to be found through the tried and true method of trial and error, strikes and gutter balls, to put it in Lebowski terms. Regardless, I find that I have had to temper certain expectations. The point is, I love my team, and they work their asses off, but it’s a challenge to maintain the push and pull of generational expectations.

I will say I have benefited greatly in my own personal life by adapting to their expectations, and I truly feel like they’ve gained a little more appreciation for how I approach things in the process. There is no black and white in management IMO, just ever-changing values of grey.”

—u/photonwranglers