[Broussebar]

So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company. IMO I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal which means more money or more benefits.

[pcthrowaway]

> So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company.

Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier. You could get some stable job and coast and do fine in the economy 20-30 years ago. I think your sympathies for the way us gens X/Y approached jobs 10 years ago is misdirected (though I suspect a lot of Millenials, especially those such as myself who aren't highly compensated, are taking a more individualistic approach to their careers now as well)

Gen Z is out here trying to survive and they've gotten an incredibly raw deal, I'd sympathize with them instead.

[ctrw]

>Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier.

I'm curious what years you think this applies to.

[silverquiet]

Same. I'm a millennial and 30 years ago I was in elementary school; not exactly looking for a job.

I think this is the first time I get to be like, "kids today don't know how hard we had it", so that's a neat experience I suppose. What I won't say is that I think they've got it any easier; indeed it seems like every generation since X has gotten a worse deal.

[pcthrowaway]

Just the overall atmosphere when the majority of millenials were entering the job market (I realize this is a good ~15-year period, but at least 10 of those years were decent) was so much better than Gen Z has it (right now).

Gen X especially had some really amazing opportunities, but income to purchasing power has been more favourable for pretty much the entire time Gen X was coming of age.

Personally, I'm just thinking about what entry-level salaries were 15 years ago compared to the cost of real estate, and I could see a clear path to homeownership for a lot of people entering the workforce at that time, even outside of the top 10% paying jobs

Gen Z unfortunately doesn't really have a practical path to homeownership (in big western cities anyway) outside of A) inheritance/family support, or B) entering the workforce into a position that would put them in the top 3-5% of their cohort

[theshrike79]

People born in the 70's and 80's, who are 40-50 years old currently.

[ctrw]

People born in 1985 entered the workforce in 2006 when finishing a three year degree. The worst financial crisis since the great depression started two years later.

Not sure what sort of rose tinted glasses you have about the 00s but they were a lot worse than today.

[piva00]

Millenials cover the mid-80s to mid-90s, 70s and 80s is mostly GenX as far as I know.

Millenials definitely didn't have it as easy, most were in their first years of career (1-5 years) when 2008 happened.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

> Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier

All I remember is a constant fear of cancer, AIDS, and massive unemployment.

[JumpCrisscross]

> I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal

This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.

[roenxi]

Senior leadership will word it more diplomatically; but that is the only mindset that makes sense for them. Once you have the power to choose to add or remove resources from a project it doesn't make sense to interact with the company in any way other than transacting skills and time for money. Except people with substantial equity stakes, for obvious reasons. One of the tells of a high-performing management culture is everyone can do their job in working hours with the skills that they have formal training in.

There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.

[leokennis]

Unless I misunderstand you, this would mean "leadership" translates to "my time is valued at $xyz per hour which I can get at companies A, B and C, but I love company D so much I will work for them for less than that". Or alternatively, "leadership" means "leaving money on the table because of a feeling of loyalty towards a corporation"?

Please correct me if I misunderstood you.

[JumpCrisscross]

Yes, you misunderstand. It's ironic, but it's a well known irony, that being outwardly transactional about a relationship can be a losing strategy. (Example: bringing a gift to a cocktail party versus giving the host the cash value of that gift.)

Loyalty shouldn't be freely given. But it's not particularly hard to spot the overly transactional types, and it also shouldn't surprise anyone that while those tactics work for a while, they cliff out before leadership. Again, that cliff is well within the range of a really good salary. But it's a cliff nonetheless.

[Broussebar]

Your work contract isn't a relationship, you're example doesn't make sense here. My company isn't a person hosting a party, so why should I bring a gift?

[foinker]

I'm not disagreeing with you on the premise that work should be mostly transactional and there should be no expectation of loyalty, but the spirit of the other guy's example is that your coworkers, the other human beings who work there and have to interact with you, will find it offputting if you are aggressively transactional with them about everything all the time.

[rokkitmensch]

My experience disagrees with this analysis. Everyone in leadership has enough of a seasoning of cynicism and sociopathy to trivially evade the common filter for transactionality.

[episteme]

You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.

[JumpCrisscross]

> can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow

I really don’t believe this is possible, but maybe others can hide it better.

> People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one

Agree on loyalty. But that’s different from holding a limited view of engagement.

[rokkitmensch]

> perhaps others can hide it better

Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.

[000ooo000]

>You’re not going to develop someone for leadership

Could've ended that sentence there and it would better reflect 99% of organisations, while also explaining part of the attitude you're referring to.

[gorbachev]

Companies have limited leadership opportunities for developers. It's pointless trying to make everyone a leader when there's 1 leadership position for every 20 developers.

Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".

[slowmovintarget]

I suppose that's true if you believe leadership is telling people what to do. That idea, however, is equally as wrong-headed as thinking you shouldn't develop leaders unless you have management headcount.

[gorbachev]

https://www.google.com/search?q=informal+leadership

[znpy]

> You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.

Most people will self-develop anyway, and at some point you'll need somebody to fill that leadership position anyway.

So this is not a problem.

Things change constantly, such is life, we'll get used to it.

[roncesvalles]

I think the reason is purely monetary.

Software developer compensation spans a very wide range, especially in the USA. Devs with the same years of experience could be earning anywhere from $50k on the low end to $500k on the high end in the same city. The "upward mobility" across the range is relatively easy and not hindered by your credentials (i.e. you aren't permanently barred from the highest end jobs because you didn't do your undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton).

The fact that the USA allows immigration means that this compensation range applies globally. A dev in Tallinn earning €80k can aspire for the $500k role in San Francisco and actually have a decent shot of getting it.

It's almost unreasonable to expect employees to remain loyal in this situation.

The phenomenon where people stayed in the same job forever happened because they couldn't really go anywhere else to make more. Indeed, at high-paying tech companies, you will find many devs who have been there for decades.

[TheChaplain]

IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.

Naturally this reflects onto businesses, which of course are made and run by people. Loyalty to employees and vice versa is gone in favour of getting the better deal.

[Broussebar]

> IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.

I disagree, loyalty in friendship or with your family is not worth less. Being loyal to human being is not stupid, for me it's being loyal to a company or a brand that is.

When being loyal to your close ones, you create trust and for me this is critical of my hapiness.

I don't get anything from being loyal to a company.

edit: typo

[ctrw]

I wonder how those generations managed to have houses and children in their 20s.

[Broussebar]

I don't fully understand your comment, are you implying that older generations were able to buy a house in their 20s because they were loyal to their companies?

[ctrw]

If young people have it figured out and don't then why are they worse off than their grandparents?

[Broussebar]

I wonder if the fact that we spend the last 50 years or so having policies erroding all our social benefits might have a role in the deterioration of overall living conditions.

But off course no, it's because our grandparents were more loyal to their companies.

[angra_mainyu]

Well, my family came up in a different country (not the US) and the two key things that enabled their rise from poverty were a literal obsession with working/putting in hours and entrepreneurship/"the hustle".

In my own life I have seen the enormous, overwhelming, and abundantly clear difference from when I self-commiserated, lamenting my own misfortune to embracing hardship, explicitly forbidding myself from whining, throwing myself into hard work, foregoing any kind of social life for a few years and eventually it all paid off, only getting better when I decided to be an entrepreneur.

But all my effort is nothing compared to the hard work my dad had to do, and even less compared to that of my grandfather's.

[ctrw]

Those policies were all put in place scant years before they started being repealed. It wasn't until LBJ that social benefits were passed en mass.

The new deal was all about giving people work, not free stuff.

[Freedom2]

Is this genuine wonderment? The state of housing in western countries has been discussed at great length and it's disingenuous to compare that across generations, whereas the state of working and how companies treat you has stayed the same, or gotten worse (as we've seen lately).