Hey, Olds: Do Not Be Scared of Young People

They’re just like we were. They’ll end up as wrong as we were.

Last month, Emma Goldberg of The New York Times wrote a fascinating piece with the irresistible headline of “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them.” The premise of the piece was that workplace managers — more specifically, middle managers — were so disoriented by the widespread changes in office attitudes, particularly among recent graduates, that they are terrified to do much of anything at all, lest they offend the kids who are ever-so-eager to own the olds on whatever social media platform they happen to be using at that time. This article was widely mocked by exactly the people you would expect to mock it, but in the weeks it has been published, I have found that its general sentiments are shared by just about everyone that I know. (You are reading someone who is nearly a decade older than the 37–year-old in the headline. Just a boring Gen Xer here.) This is exactly how a ton of bosses, and managers, feel about their young employees. They’re terrified of them.

This is an undeniable change. It’s not that kids today are any more obnoxious or more certain their bosses are idiots than they have always been; I thought my bosses were lame and wrong about everything just like my parents thought their bosses were lame and wrong about everything. The difference is in the power dynamics. This quote tells the story:

“These younger generations are cracking the code and they’re like, ‘Hey guys turns out we don’t have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it,’” said Colin Guinn, 41, co-founder of the robotics company Hangar Technology. “‘We can actually do whatever we want and be just as successful.’ And us old people are like, ‘What is going on?’”

I am fairly certain — sorry, kids — that “these younger generations” have not “cracked the code” any more than I thought my generation had. (We hadn’t, it turned out.) The phrase “hey guys turns out we don’t have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it” has surely been uttered hundreds of thousands of times throughout history, and will be uttered hundreds of thousands of times more. The difference is that if I were to say it 20 years ago, my bosses either would have fired me, or…