A tech entrepreneur named Jason Calacanis has written an interesting piece directed at today’s 20-something hyper-entitlement generation. Well worth a read!
Here’s a snippet:
Many millennials not only don’t want jobs, they simply don’t deserve them. They can’t take even a tiny amount of criticism and they need constant adulation for amazing efforts like, ummmm, showing up for work.
A frequent refrain I hear from these folks is, “I’ve been working here for almost six months and you haven’t recognized the work I’ve put in!” Of course my reaction to this is “Oh, I’m sorry, please tell me what you’ve accomplished.”
That is usually a short conversation which includes that the person came in and worked for the hours in which they were paid to work. In other words, they want the participation trophy. They want credit for coming to work for the hours they’ve been paid. That’s not how it works in my mind, but I decided to relent.
Related: Speaking of the entitlement generation, it turns out that Kai Nagata hasn’t yet found an employer who appreciates him. Reading through his latest blog posting, it’s revealed that he still hates conservatives and is actively doing his part to destroy the Alberta oil industry. But he’s looking for you to pay for his lifestyle. Perhaps he can get the Alberta government to support him?!
If Jason was lucky enough to know a few of the guys I worked for and with who won WW2 and actually build the economy He’s working in (Whatever is left of it since the Boomers and their successors got through self actualizing and navel gazing and whatever)He might have an inkling what a work ethic really is.
By any other name, Kai Nagata, is still a paracite.
He’s pretty unconcerned now with the whole no-job thing. Wonder if he’ll be as nonchalant with a wife and a kid to look after?
Oh sorry, what was I thinking? Gen Y is the “kick her to the curb” generation.
Parasitic narcissism and delusional dipshittery.
As a young 37 year old, I am terrified for when I will need to higher employees for my company as it grows. Regardless of the younger generation and their threat to the workforce, it is important to say that through my experiences in the trades for the past 20 years the threat started before my generation.
I am blessed to have two parents that know what quality and “time in” means. Their work ethic was a great role model for both my brother and I.
I would also like to say that hanging out with fools rubs off. I haven’t met a person who has a bad work ethic who I would like to spend time with outside the work environment. Coincidence?
My father and mother were the typical immigrant story of the 50’s: Came to a new country from war destroyed Europe, worked hard, saved well, didn’t look for handouts and were quite successful.
Decades ago now, my father being the uneducated wise old fart he was said two absolutely astoundingly insightful things in an effort to wizen me up to the realities of the world. One of which is sooooooo eerily precognitive.
He often said the problem with our country is there too many people worrying about making sure we have the most wonderful perfect dinner plates to eat off of and not enough people worrying about how to pay for the food that should be on it.
So in turn he felt and said that the mentally and physically lazy people Jason speaks of – cough – Kai, are so stupid that even if you gave them a kick in the ass they would have no clue what it was for thus the effort would be a waste. Better off just letting them go.
Now a days (thank God that my father is not here to see this)., the courts penalize employers for jettisoning stupid or dangerous probationary idiots that an employer took a risk on taking on as they should have been coddled and not fired.
I added to my father’s “thread” when I repeat these wise thoughts to people that there are a 1,000 Chinese workers willing to take this idiot’s job.
I always had a hard time believing all these stories about lazy young people but I must know admit that they are true. A friend of mine who is about 40 is a succesful auto mechanic. He served his time and then bought his own shop. He works like a dog and can’t find an apprentice or helper who will show up regularly, stay all day and work hard. In the couple of years since he has had his own shop he had been through a dozen apprenticeships and can’t get a decent one.
It is going to be really interesting to see how many donations Kai can get. Leftist don’t usually part with their own money.
Who the hell are the idiots in colleges paying this guy a speaker’s fee? What are his qualifications: I had a good job, so I decided to quit, here’s how you can be a loser too?
I look forward to Kai’s first documentary…possible tittles…Roughing it in Grandma’s Backyard…The Blackberry and Bean Diet…Couch Surfing for Dummies…I Don’t Need No Stinking Job…Butterflys are Free, Everything Else is F@#$ing Expensive…Doh! the Documentary…
As was stated elsewhere …. If I know the MSM, they were more enamored with Kai Nagata’s exotic, multiculti name than is skills as a jejune journalist.
He betrayed them …. they will not forget … he is done like dinner.
For being unemployed, he sure has lots of gas money to tool around the US of A, and BC…….anybody report him to EI?
Entitlement is thy name.
He sure has a lot of money (credit cards?) to finance has sojourns to and fro.
But he laments over Jack, disses Perry and Palin, and is an environmentalist.
Loser!
I have a high tolerance for idiots,I actually enjoy their ramblings most of the time. However this guy….I could only last for 5 or 6 paragraphs. There is something about his woe is me,”human beings need hope”,style that is depressing.I didn’t want to hear what he had to say next,he is way too full of himself,and rather boring.
At the federal level, this was the summer that Jack Layton died. Say what you will about his platform, the guy understood that human beings need hope.”
Um…yeah. Except what exactly does “hope” mean, anyway? Our neighbours to the south elected for president a guy who promised them “hope”. Turns out that “hope” means soaring unemployment and wildly expanding debt.
Kai is not going to work out well. He hasn’t the mental toughness, maturity or common sense to understand that nobody cares about his pathetic, self centered existence and his sense of importance is neither earned nor valid.
He is a nobody, going nowhere and when his life implodes around him, nobody will care.
Right said Fred!
I may be in a blessed part of the spectrum, but being in IT the young folks I have are great. Smart, hard working and innovative, always looking for ways to do it better. Never a peep when when it comes to forced overtime to recover from a major outage. Then again, these are software/hardware engineers, technologists and analysts. Uncontaminated by the entitlement crap since they actually had to prove they could code, recover a server or analyse a major software requirement before they graduated and were considered usable material.
Anyone with a degree (university or college) lacking in the hard stuff wouldn’t even get a response from me.
Kai’s the real deal, in his own mind anyway. Now if he can just figure out the capitalism part so he can monetize it. I suggest he begin by figuring out the donate button in the sidebar thingy.
Nagata doesn’t need hope. He needs the experience of being productive and earning his way. That would do more for his self-esteem than any amount of navel gazing.
Down with oil pipelines. Oh, but I’m keeping the Ford Ranger. oh, and the cell phone. . . and the internet and the computers. . . while eating beans from my grandma’s back yard. . . until I’ve had two servings of them at which point I’ll be tired of them. Then I’ll mooch off someone else. . . until I’m tired of that. Then I’ll probably get a student loan and study navel gazing 101.
What a crock of crap. Companies today don’t give a sh*t about their employees, yet they expect people to bust their humps to “add value”? Been there done that, got “dismissed without cause”.
The CEOs, CFOs and boardroom sluts can go screw themselves. I’m in my early 50s and I will never rely on any of those a$$holes for an income again.
So, Jason, stop f*cking whining, man up, grow a pair, and actually DO something to inspire loyalty. Otherwise, STFU.
I will need to higher employees.
I rest my case. Oh, and Dude, spell checker won’t find that one. You have to know the difference between “Hire” and higher.
To hell with these entitlement piglets. I can make more money with less hassle with NO employees, and just hi-grading the easiest best-paying jobs.
I know this all too well. I have interviewed untold numbers of people to try and fill reception and entry level accounting positions. At this point I would rather put in an automated phone system and type my own stuff. The attitude of the young people is appalling. They all want to be paid far more than what they are worth considering most have no experience.
We ask them to fill out an application even though it asks them the for the same information that is on their resume. The reason is to see what their handwriting and spelling is like, none of them ever seem to figure this out. Spelling is atrocious and most have handwriting like chimps.
Of the ones we have hired no one will put in extra hours or extra effort to get ahead or learn the job. I dread the future since I know what the present is like.
The entitlement generation are the baby boomers. Nobody else ever had it so good. No one ever will again thanks to the debt they accumulated at their children and grandchildrens expense.
I don’t know where you get your employees are from, but I have the opposite experiences. With the new graduate unemployment rate so absurdly high, competition forces these kids to work their asses off for much less pay than they feel ‘entitled’ too.
The entitlement generation are the baby boomers. Nobody else ever had it so good. No one ever will again thanks to the debt they accumulated at their children and grandchildrens expense
Speak for yourself dude. I have no debt, and haven’t had any for many years.
Blame yourself not others for any misfortune in your life.
“might drive people to create a movement where people want to stop paying taxes, shut down the government, arm themselves to the hilt with weapons that are designed strictly for mass killings of other human beings and obsess over immigration.”
aren’t those called teapartiers?
Powerfactor:
I am happy you don’t have these problems. Practically none of the candidates I interview don’t really care about landing a job. The last one I offered a job to (after three interviews) turned us down when we gave her the final job offer. No experience, no other job offers, just turned us down. It is really frustrating to try and hire someone.
As an employer with a small business in England from
1981 to 2003 I tried to employ dozens of young men for fairly basic production work. Black or white, their main problems were inadequate literacy and numeracy. They were not unintelligent, just untaught. When you could not rely on them being able to read labels or count packages, problems of supervision increased enormously. The one area where state education had succeeded in its objectives was to give them a sense of “self esteem” – something rather different from self respect.
During part of this time I was also on the board of governors of a local primary school, the one which my own children had attended some years before. The head teacher was worried about falling standards in reading.
The problem was increasing with the number of well-intentioned younger teachers who had been indoctrinated to use so-called “progressive” methods – but she could not see this, as the local education authority told her that “best educational practice” was being followed in her school. The children sat in little groups facing each other, not the teacher and were not made to sit still, be quiet and pay attention.
All the work they produced, however unsatisfactory had to be “celebrated” as an “achievement”. To give just one example, the school had an exhibition of paintings of people at work. Some of them were very good and each child had to put a short explanatory note of what sort of work was being shown.
One lad had done a splendid, dramatic picture of a fireman putting out a fire. His title “A FIREMAN” had been crossed out and replaced by the politically correct, gender neutral “FIRE FIGHTER”
but mistakes of spelling and punctuation were uncorrected. I asked the teacher about this and was told it would be “too discouraging” for the child to correct the mistakes!
“If you don’t tell them what’s wrong, how can they learn what’s right?” I asked.
“It will come” I was told. Yet “it” had not “come” for the young men ten to fifteen years older whom I was trying to employ.
1) Quit great job, having no qualification, burn bridges, pursue dreams, find self.
2) ???
3) Profit!
I wouldn’t even mind – whatever, good luck, meh, etc. – if he weren’t so full of himself. Also, “Kai”? He’s, what, Keanu’s less talented kid brother?
Does an environmentalist have a 4 wheel drive, even if it does have a bike strapped to the back of it?
I think Kai ought to seize the moral high ground by using a more environmentally friendly form of transport. Can I suggest a pogo stick?
“I think Kai ought to seize the moral high ground by using a more environmentally friendly form of transport.”
Oh, SO right on Paul. How about Shank’s mare? If this kid -walked- across the USA and Canada I’d be more impressed than him driving his Ford Exploder around on Mum’s credit card.
Its good that kids should challenge the status quo by finding better ways of doing things than what we old b@st@rds came up with. Its bad that they should just complain about the status quo and sponge off their parents.
I recall kids at school…their greatest insult they could hurl was…
“Do you think you are better than everybody else?”
………Usually after coming in last.
My, now deceased Dad, used to refer to such people and the parents as…
“They think the world owes them a living.”
I think you are making a big mistake if your concern only lies with the young geneeration of today. There are enough boomers with the same attitude. The difference is that our society has been able to carry them to date. As we all should recognize those days are coming to an end.
I saw some stat that 70% of people over 50 have less than $25k in retirement savings. Who seeriously thinks that government will be able to top off CPP & OAS enough to make a dif? Guess what, the 70% aforementioned. In the last election the NDP were calling for a doubling of CPP benefits to provide enough for a living retirement. BC seniors are calling for elimination of BC Med premiums. The bottom line is there is ‘no free lunch’. No matter how many times you hear that it does not sink in with the majority.
The crux of the issue is that when more people are taking from the system than those putting in, it will end in a collapse. Democracy practically ensures this outcome. The vast majority of people, no matter what generation, will not sacrifice for tomorrow. Yes, the education system can be blamed, but ultimately our society directs that system.
This is the result of the generation that was given white “Participant” ribbons rather than 1st, 2nd and 3rd place ribbons at the end of a “competition”.
Can’t agree that the baby boomers have created the mess we have when it comes to the entitlement generation. Myself and many if not the majority of my friends growing up where told no if we wanted a car we worked to buy one, we where disciplined, expected to get dirty, know right from wrong and just try at life because ultimately as individuals we where responsible for it.
We didn’t have safety rules, harassment policies, and grown men where not concerned with what they had to teach us and how conflicted with the rules of the day. They held us to standards their mom’s and dad’s and most of their communities held them too.
The lack of the same standards today by the way has totally and almost completely screwed the upcoming workforce especially if it involves sweat, callouses and independent thought to keep ones a s s safe , get anything done and what used to be obvious EARN a frigging pay check.
The only thing hard working responsible baby boomers failed at was not seeing just how much damage progressives can cause a society, while being to humble and nice to stand up for values that built this country.
I told Kai to work or starve but not to expect others to pay his way, I also told him if he is looking for sympathy he can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.
I really doubt he will get that.
Calacanis: “When they give me that look I say, “It’s okay, I won’t take it personally… you can tell me. What would you rather be doing?” This of course is me trying to get a read on folks. There is only one correct answer to this question when you are interviewing for a job: “No, there is nothing I’d rather being doing than helping you build a great company Jason!” ”
Talk about ego and entitlement! Either he wants a sycophantic yes man willing to say whatever the boss wants to hear whether it’s true or not, or he wants someone with NO ambition. If I was interviewing for a receptionist position and the candidate told me there was NOTHING in the world she would rather be doing than answer my phones, I wouldn’t think very highly of her at all! She’s either lying or she has no plans to ever further herself beyond a receptionist position.
I agree that if the candidate said something like “I would rather win the lottery so I could sit at home and not work”, that would be pretty telling. But the only acceptable answer is to blow smoke up his arse? He pretty much just wants an ego stroke every time he interviews someone.
Yesterday, a Friday afternoon, my husband returned from the pharmacy he’s being going to for decades. It turned out the prescription he had was for a person with the same last name, but the first names were decidedly different. He had to make an extra trip.
Charitably, he said, “She seemed young and was probably new on the job.” Maybe she was, but it would seem that the lowest level expectation would be to CHECK THE NAME ON THE PRESCRIPTION! My husband’s situation was not dire, but what if the other person had REALLY NEEDED the drug and couldn’t get it—and his doctor was unavailable? The possibility of a real calamity was real.
I’m sure that many others here also notice that these “youngsters” will take up the whole sidewalk and not make the slightest move to let a pedestrian walk by—even if one is hugging a few square inches at the outer boundary of the public space. I could go on . . . Even my twenty-something daughters are remarking on the barbaric behaviour of their peers.
God help us.
The ME generation were breast fed on self esteem, no matter how badly they failed at whatever they attempted they were rewarded with feel good gold stars and pats on the back. He’s Atypical of that generation, they wanted for nothing and in return they give back nothing to society. On the upside their parents will leave them nothing but accummulated debt when they die and then they’ll have to grow up or become homeless people.
The young and entitled….
We didn’t raise our daughter that way, but, thanks to her entitled friends, whose parents willfully enabled, we now have a full fledged 18 year old “The world owes me” type.
Very difficult situation……she has worked at the typical teen jobs, and has done well that way, but we made her pay for her smart phone monthly, which she resented. We make her pay her car insurance, which she resents, and her gas. She scammed us for the car, promising to make payments (HA!) which I knew wouldn’t happen, but I was outvoted.
She resents the fact she has to pay half her tuition, upon which I offered her the opportunity to go her own way, and find her own place if that was terribly unfair….funny she didn’t take us up on the offer, things got kind of quiet.
The way the education system is set up aids in the entitlement as well. By the time they reach Grade 12, they have enough credits to graduate, save for the need to take English 12, in BC. So, what happens, is you have most of the Grade 12s taking the absolute minimum courses in their final year, basically turns into a year off, thanks to the Min. of Education. It is more important, to them, to graduate the max number of students, that is accomplished by lowering the standards to graduate….brilliant…..that’s why many of these ‘graduates’ are functionally illiterate…..
College comes along, and, being the first week, my kid is freaking out because of all the homework she has, and how its “totally unfair”, because she also has her part-time jobs. Not that we haven’t mentioned this was coming, a few dozen times…….they only hear what they want to hear, the rest of the time, I guess we sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher “Wah, wah, wah, wah”
Ah, the teen/young adult years, where they know everything, except when confronted with the truth.
I hope one day she wakes up to realize that her spoiled, arrogant, pompous friends had nothing special going for them, other than looks and figures…..and that the bling and me-me-me of the Hollyweird world is just an alternate, fantasy universe, a lie, one which the youth of our world wants to emulate, but can’t resolve the reason why they don’t have it.
-rant ended-
Our kids start working as soon as they start wanting rugby trips and expensive jeans. By the time they need college tuition and car insurance they have people offering them jobs based on their own reputations as workers and their older siblings’ reputations. Most of their friends spend the summer doing nothing, both parents working hard to support their kids’ WOW and LOL addictions,BB, and eating out habits. A counter-cultural lifestyle pays off big-time in our household!
Glenn:
Give knacker a break. Maybe he meant “two higher employees”.
This sounds like unionized employees of all ages to me. Especially public sector union employees. Just put in the time – forget about actually accomplishing anything. I think that the problem started in previous generations and has slowly crept into mainstream. The problem being the complete and utter lowering of expections. Low expectations from parents, teachers, and others set them up for a huge crash when they enter the workforce and expectations are suddenly raised. Do your kids (and their future employers) a favour and raise your expectations of them.
Why would anyone be surprised?
Obama is the perfect poster boy for this attitude.
I can’t fully agree or disagree with the arguments presented. I’m 29 so I guess I’m right in between the two generations (graduated in 2000). I’ve had a job since I was 13, except for maybe a few weeks.
Started my own business at 21, bought a semi, and never looked back. Sure I don’t put on as many miles as the older guys, but I take care of more things at home, and at my parents place as well. I also do all of my own work on the truck.
I don’t know where all this anger against my generation comes from, but there are lazy people in every generation.
And BTW, in my eyes generation warfare is no different than class warfare.
Both are used and abused heavily by the left.
DaninBC
Bingo!
We punted our daughter 10 years ago at the tender age of 21 because she:
1. Couldn’t hold down a job,
2. Argued all the time with us, favorite one being there are no absolutes,
3. Couldn’t or wouldn’t do her ‘chores’ (ie: take garbage out, empty dishwasher, and rotational scheduled vacuuming) – everyone rows the boat in this household and I had to make a decision.
So after crying how hard done, off she went bouncing from friend to friend’s house and while she did well in one job due to her university education, she quit that now and is working at another job steady – thankfully she’s realizing the bills don’t go away.
Still likes to argue about no absolutes, how Christianity is wrong, and how we screwed her childhood up.
Sadly she’s still a tinderbox and I have to treat her with kid gloves when at family get-togethers and avoid certain topics. Very opinionated but doesn’t allow others to speak.
Even at 31 now, I wonder what the university did to her rational thought process.
Her wife is becoming a ‘mommy’ soon (you read that right), so maybe some things will start becoming more clear that indeed life does have absolutes…
But I know a day will come when we’ll be told not to pervert her kid’s mind with Christian absolutes (you know like sin, redemption, blood sacrifice) – after all back at 21 she told us her lesbian Sociology University prof knew more about life than our ‘dinosaur’ Christian ideologies.
absolutes as in, you absolutely must take care of your children?
Nope allan, absolutes as cause and effect, right and wrong, what you do now affects your future, usual stuff to teach kids.
what they do with it is their choice, but while they are at home, they follow the rules.