Pain For Gain Is Gen Y's Credo

Willing to "serve time" for long term rewards.

Twenty-eight year old Potsy reports that his friends in university were totally oriented to doing things they didn't like for long term rewards.

While in college, I saw my classmates putting a lot of work into participating in student organizations, voluntary research activities, workshops and conferences, mainly because “it looks good on a resume”.

In our final year of school, most of them were not so much into finding jobs they’d find fulfilling, but rather, jobs with big name firms, whose culture, organizational structure and policies they didn’t care much about.

Potsy himself admits that:

in the early stages of their career, people have to make sacrifices and investments so they can move forward.

However he believes that passion should not be totally surbordinated to the goal of building a name-dropping resume that shows that you've been hanging the proper places.

Is this guy too old to be a real Gen Y? What about his friends?

Comments

[Colin Kingsbury]

The primary difference between someone who is 28 and someone who is 23 is not that the 28-year-old is "not quite gen-Y" and the 23yo is, but rather that the 28yo has, ceteris paribus, two to five *times* more time on his or her own as a person, living outside the womb of school and parents. All a 23-year-old can have about career issues are opinions, while a 28-year-old will have experience.

[Recruiting Animal]

The Animal always likes to get a comment from Collie however I fink you missed a key point on this one.

You're saying that the younger Gen Yers, the fresh grads, espouse one set of values that are being widely propagandized right now whereas the older Gen Y guy is more battle hardened and realistic than people just a few years younger than him.

That sounds plausible. But notice that he is saying that his friends -- while still in school -- were doing things for "inauthentic" reasons.

They didn't care about finding meaningful work in companies whose culture they respect. They just wanted to get jobs in name brand firms, period.

And they were willing to do all sorts of things they had no feeling for -- even while in university -- in order to get the right experience on their resumes.

This goes directly against the grain of most Gen Y propaganda which claims that they are very picky about where they work and will only accept work they enjoy in companies whose culture is sympatico with their own.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Like the 60s flower children, most of the statements being made about Gen Y are true only at the population level, and can serve only as hints as to how any individual or small group thereof might think. The 60s gave us a lot of grass-smoking journalists inspired by Woodstock, but probably a lot more engineers inspired by Apollo. Is it any surprise who all the articles have been written about over the years?

At the level of an individual there is a lot of selection going on in terms of surrounding yourself with people whose preferences are similar to your own. As a senior in college majoring in economics I still had friends who were dance and drama majors; these days I'm happy to have friends who don't work in software startups.