4 ms·

"I wanted 65 hour weeks in a high pressure corporate environment. I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect,

"I wanted 65 hour weeks in a high pressure corporate environment. I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect, and the power. I wanted to be someone. I wanted to be able to afford to donate to charities that are important to me. I was considering children, marriage, the house, all of it. It's not happening." Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30? There are very few industries where that's the norm. Perhaps some of my peers have totally unrealistic expectations! Too many movies, too much TV, and too much time spent reading about other people's lives on Quora. I don't have dreams about my current job that's a good 40-hour week (sometimes 45), lets me drive a used Toyota, and helps me pay a mortgage on a modest home, have a wife and a child, and enjoy a meal out every now and then. I can still save some money for retirement, even if it's just a tiny bit each month. I enjoy my life, and hope for something better, but I work one day at a time to achieve that dream, and I don't complain about it!

ebiester 14y ago
"the chance at a high income" That doesn't speak to entitlement to me, but rather just getting on the path that, with hard work, can lead there. The problem is that many are unable to even get their foot in the door. The hope is eventually it will change with the boomers retiring and opening up positions, but there is always the danger that this generation will be skipped. However, the same fear happened to Gen X, that GenX would be skipped over, but after some major growing pains that generation too found their way in. Perhaps instead, the problem is that those who graduate into a recession are leapfrogged by those who graduate into a great market. There are other studies that show the disparity in lifetime earnings based on this.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I am roughly the same age as this person, and as kids we were told that all we had to do was work hard in school and high incomes would come our way. And so we, generally speaking, did – well over 50% of the Canadian population have achieved an education level higher than high school, and is considered one of the most educated nations. Of course that idea is impossible. High earnings are not an absolute value, only a value greater than a typical income. If we all received high incomes, that income would just become typical, leaving a small group with an even higher income to strive towards. This person is making an average income, which is where you would expect the average person growing up in our generation to be. We cannot all be above average. It is a logical impossibility.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    I am roughly the same age as this person, and as kids we were told that all we had to do was work hard in school and high incomes would come our way. Actually, my experience is that high incomes did come our way. Sort-of. The problem is that the price of everything went way up. If you include the fact that career needs now necessitate living in a high-COL area, inflation is much more than the 2% on paper.
  - ebiester 14y ago
    Ah, but there's a problem here. I've seen it with a few of my friends. They graduated college, and couldn't find anything. They took what was available, typically call center jobs. Then, when entry level jobs came in their desired field, they were passed over because their experience was in low skilled positions. Those leaving college are given a free pass since they aren't expected to have experience. However, once you take that low skill position, it's much harder to climb back up.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30? If you don't get it when you're 30, then you're not going to get it at 35 or 40. Age without progress decreases opportunities. He's 29 and has shown no progress, and you seem to be surprised that he's expecting progress. We can mock his douchey goals, and perhaps we should, but the fact is that a whole generation was bred for executive positions that are no longer available (and shouldn't exist). What he probably needed to do, in order to pursue his douchey vision of a cushy cigar-smoking executive job, was get an investment banking or management consulting job. Those aren't my favorite industries, but a few years of time in them will open the kinds of doors he wants. The BMW and the fatal heart attack at 45 could be his, if he had made the right moves years ago. However, it's too late for him now. With an empty resume, he can't compete against 22-year-old college grads. That's just how it works. In the Mad Men era, a college degree got you a junior executive job. You became an "account executive" or a marketing person. Sure, you were still someone's bitch-- being at the bottom of the executive-track totem pole-- and you probably had no direct reports, but you were on a track toward something better. Those junior executive jobs are gone. Why? After 3 decades of downsizing, the corporate "fat" has been trimmed. That's probably a good thing, but what it means is that all those junior-executive jobs have been filled by people who used to be senior executives. Companies don't have the slots to take on 22-year-old proteges anymore. Again, it's probably good for the world that we're not generating all these supernumerary "executives" who do nothing but annoy the people doing the actual work, but it's not good for people who were bred (through parental expectations and undergraduate education and, in some cases, graduate degrees) for these positions. Undergraduate college is the liberal arts. (Sciences are liberal arts.) "Liberal" in this sense has nothing to do with political ideology, but rather means "for the free". The contrast is servile arts. It makes me angry when self-righteous Baby Boomers complain about "entitled" Millennials. On Sunday, they write on the Internet about these supposedly entitled schmucks who won't settle for anything less than a career-track job. Then on Monday, they turn down the 27-year-old barista who did take one of those crummy jobs and now has "no relevant work experience". They made and supported this world and they can fucking eat it. The real problem is that the whole concept of "management", in the traditional sense, has become pointless. College breeds you to be one of three things: (A) an academic or researcher, (B) a highly-skilled professional with high autonomy, or (C) a manager. Class A is dying out. Class B is losing autonomy, as the professions are eroded and traditionally intellectual fields (e.g. software engineering) are commoditized in an idiotic lurch toward a manage-or-be-managed corporate world, and class C is becoming obsolete enough that these junior executive jobs don't make sense and have been cut.

ebiester 14y ago

"the chance at a high income" That doesn't speak to entitlement to me, but rather just getting on the path that, with hard work, can lead there. The problem is that many are unable to even get their foot in the door. The hope is eventually it will change with the boomers retiring and opening up positions, but there is always the danger that this generation will be skipped. However, the same fear happened to Gen X, that GenX would be skipped over, but after some major growing pains that generation too found their way in. Perhaps instead, the problem is that those who graduate into a recession are leapfrogged by those who graduate into a great market. There are other studies that show the disparity in lifetime earnings based on this.

randomdata 14y ago
I am roughly the same age as this person, and as kids we were told that all we had to do was work hard in school and high incomes would come our way. And so we, generally speaking, did – well over 50% of the Canadian population have achieved an education level higher than high school, and is considered one of the most educated nations. Of course that idea is impossible. High earnings are not an absolute value, only a value greater than a typical income. If we all received high incomes, that income would just become typical, leaving a small group with an even higher income to strive towards. This person is making an average income, which is where you would expect the average person growing up in our generation to be. We cannot all be above average. It is a logical impossibility.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I am roughly the same age as this person, and as kids we were told that all we had to do was work hard in school and high incomes would come our way. Actually, my experience is that high incomes did come our way. Sort-of. The problem is that the price of everything went way up. If you include the fact that career needs now necessitate living in a high-COL area, inflation is much more than the 2% on paper.
- ebiester 14y ago
  Ah, but there's a problem here. I've seen it with a few of my friends. They graduated college, and couldn't find anything. They took what was available, typically call center jobs. Then, when entry level jobs came in their desired field, they were passed over because their experience was in low skilled positions. Those leaving college are given a free pass since they aren't expected to have experience. However, once you take that low skill position, it's much harder to climb back up.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Do people really expect to get something like that by the time they're 30? If you don't get it when you're 30, then you're not going to get it at 35 or 40. Age without progress decreases opportunities. He's 29 and has shown no progress, and you seem to be surprised that he's expecting progress. We can mock his douchey goals, and perhaps we should, but the fact is that a whole generation was bred for executive positions that are no longer available (and shouldn't exist). What he probably needed to do, in order to pursue his douchey vision of a cushy cigar-smoking executive job, was get an investment banking or management consulting job. Those aren't my favorite industries, but a few years of time in them will open the kinds of doors he wants. The BMW and the fatal heart attack at 45 could be his, if he had made the right moves years ago. However, it's too late for him now. With an empty resume, he can't compete against 22-year-old college grads. That's just how it works. In the Mad Men era, a college degree got you a junior executive job. You became an "account executive" or a marketing person. Sure, you were still someone's bitch-- being at the bottom of the executive-track totem pole-- and you probably had no direct reports, but you were on a track toward something better. Those junior executive jobs are gone. Why? After 3 decades of downsizing, the corporate "fat" has been trimmed. That's probably a good thing, but what it means is that all those junior-executive jobs have been filled by people who used to be senior executives. Companies don't have the slots to take on 22-year-old proteges anymore. Again, it's probably good for the world that we're not generating all these supernumerary "executives" who do nothing but annoy the people doing the actual work, but it's not good for people who were bred (through parental expectations and undergraduate education and, in some cases, graduate degrees) for these positions. Undergraduate college is the liberal arts. (Sciences are liberal arts.) "Liberal" in this sense has nothing to do with political ideology, but rather means "for the free". The contrast is servile arts. It makes me angry when self-righteous Baby Boomers complain about "entitled" Millennials. On Sunday, they write on the Internet about these supposedly entitled schmucks who won't settle for anything less than a career-track job. Then on Monday, they turn down the 27-year-old barista who did take one of those crummy jobs and now has "no relevant work experience". They made and supported this world and they can fucking eat it. The real problem is that the whole concept of "management", in the traditional sense, has become pointless. College breeds you to be one of three things: (A) an academic or researcher, (B) a highly-skilled professional with high autonomy, or (C) a manager. Class A is dying out. Class B is losing autonomy, as the professions are eroded and traditionally intellectual fields (e.g. software engineering) are commoditized in an idiotic lurch toward a manage-or-be-managed corporate world, and class C is becoming obsolete enough that these junior executive jobs don't make sense and have been cut.