> Generation Z (Gen Z) has a reputation for being challenging to work with and difficult to manage.
If you do not compare the results with a similar poll for when other generations where entering the market, the article reads like an arbitrary roast on Gen Z.
Likewise it didn't even compare to other current workers. For instance it says, "6 in 10 companies fired a recent college graduate they hired this year", but but doesn't say how many companies fired other workers they hired this year or better yet what percent of workers hired this year have already been fired broken down by age and college experience.
> If you do not compare the results with a similar poll for when other generations where entering the market, the article reads like an arbitrary roast on Gen Z.
Every generation of Grandpas claim the winters were colder and the fish were larger then when they were kids. I won't be fooled into believing climate change and fish population collapse!
Maybe every generation of graduates is getting less employable.
To add what you said, the poll asks: " 25% state that all recent college graduate hires worked out well, while 62% mention that only some were successful. Further, 14% report that only a few or none of the hires were successful."
The interpretation of result depends on what "some" means, it could be reasonably be 50%, 75%, 85%, or 95%. If it's 50%, it seems bad. If it's above 75%, that's pretty good overall,
I wondered the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case, and it can also shift with the Overton window over time. It might be that if you took two generations ago and had a Time Machine to compared to today, the differences would be so evident that the contrast would be even more meaningful.
I would also say that more than 1 in 6 companies don’t have the culture or resources to make college graduates successful - I’m more experienced with software engineers, but it takes significant time and effort from management and senior talent to make recent graduates set up for success. It’s less for other senior talent, but sometimes senior talent still needs significant help.
One good thing about most college graduates is that they can generally learn new things quickly, especially if they’re willing to put in some effort.
> I would also say that more than 1 in 6 companies don’t have the culture or resources to make college graduates successful
There is a lot of truth to this, in my experience. Larger companies (F500) have formalized rotational programs for new grads which sets them up for success, but they can only take a limited amount of grads and almost no middle + small companies have anything similar.
The corporate culture of hiring new grads seemed to die in the GFC of 2008. Companies thought it would be too great a risk to hire someone with no experience, so they would have job postings for candidates with "2 to 5 years of experience." This is also why we have a perpetual talent shortage in that demographic, bc everyone wanst them and there isn't a new pipeline of young people to back fill that range.
It’s one thing to train a person. It’s another to teach them not to interrupt people or be rude. I had a recent experience with a college student who had just terrible communication skills. It was a total turn off, and the quality of the work was good. And yet I’d never choose to work with this person again.
I’ve found places that only hire “senior” dev talent to be pretty trash culture-wise. Management only wants coders who can pump out features and does nothing to invest in any type of learning or support. Even things like documentation are deprioritized because any new dev should be able to “hit the ground running” because, hey, we only hire experienced engineers, right?
I've worked at three tech companies with that policy and various degrees of success with it. One had the best documentation and onboarding experience I've seen so far. The other two were close to what you describe.
Complaints against self absorbed and lazy millennials have been an annoying trope for my entire professional life.
The ancient Greeks complained thier kids were disrespecting them.
I do enough work with new grads to feel comfortable declaring the kids are alright. Gen Z doesn’t feel different fundamentally from millennials to me. We’ve had good (mostly) and bad hires over time. College hires (really any early in career hires) have more variability over experienced hires because they may not belong in it profession they’ve chosen, but that’s been true over time.
The one really shocking number is the 6/10 have fired a recent grad. Given how hard it is to get rid of someone generally that is a huge number.
FWIW, the last firing of a new hire I was remotely a part of involved a Gen x or elder millennial woman who could not behave appropriately at work and managed to document her inappropriate behavior on company IT assets.
This article is based on a online poll of 966 people with murky qualifications for having a meaningful opinion about what seem, at best, to be silly questions.
I could see this as a first step towards some more interesting work and data collection, but can't imagine there is any actual signal here worth writing about.
It’s sorta like when I wanted to break into the market as a Linux sysadmin and all the opening positions required 3-5 years of experience. There’s no room to be a beginner and no training.
I got my DevOps job with quite a bit less experience than the job posting stated. Granted I was an internal hire, but I still learned the lesson that you miss all the shots you never take. Just apply!
If you're still interested, ignore the requirement. Most Linux sysadmins are self-made and supply is tight enough that nobody will care if you prove you know your stuff.
When I was a student I was hanging out in an IRC room for discussion of SELinux, asking questions. One night a Red Hatter PMd me and invited me to apply for a job, which was an exciting thing because I'd never been asked to apply for a job before. But my heart sank because the job ad had a huge list of requirements, so I regretfully informed the guy that I couldn't apply because I did not have enough years of experience. He just laughed and said there were probably five people on the planet who actually met those job requirements and told me to apply anyway.
In the end I didn't because I wasn't actually finished with the degree at that time, but the way he treated the job ad as a bit of a joke was definitely a useful life lesson. Job ads are often not written by the people who want to hire, so a lot gets lost in translation.
Lots of companies need skills they don't know how to ask for. So they advertise for the wrong things. For example a medium size real estate firm probably needs someone to deal with the computers. Its a grind but cold reach out can go far
this seems like bad example.. a commercial company in the US almost always has Windows.. Windows is a merry-go-round of virus and intrusive, debilitating updates. Professional consultants in every big city exist to do nothing but get paid to babysit Windows. Why spend money on training a junior that may leave, instead of hiring the consultants that know how to babysit Windows? .. Secondly, real estate is close to law and banking, where there is a culture of semi-arbitrary seniority.. juniors do as they are told by their managers or else you are replaced. It is a situation that most adults quickly try to leave, but there are infinite numbers of new semi-desperate people to replace the juniors, as there have been for the last several centuries in those professions.
For those two reasons, a real estate office is a bad example of the dynamics of hiring junior (high skill) CS graduates IMHO
I agree that companies do a poor job of advertising and screening for skills that they really need. Guessing, it might have to do with HR or worse, bad-intention managers, copying the habits of other hiring practices blindly.
The best path for juniors IMO is through consulting companies, they are built to train and level folks up. Folks can then choose when they want off the consulting rollercoaster.
Alternatively having a real apprenticeship program developed for tech would be super useful, but we hate it when we try to do real engineer things.
If you have no formal job experience, thats fine - apply anyway and most likely you'll get to the point where you can demonstrate your skills. Government stuff aside, most job requirements are extremely flexible.
Agree, there's nothing in this article that makes me think that it wouldn't be equally true if you wrote it ten years ago about millenials.
Or twenty-five years ago about Gen X.
It's just an article about "how older people tend to feel about hiring new college grads". There's nothing new about Gen Z that makes them somehow "less hireable".
Readit News
> Generation Z (Gen Z) has a reputation for being challenging to work with and difficult to manage.
If you do not compare the results with a similar poll for when other generations where entering the market, the article reads like an arbitrary roast on Gen Z.
I will not get fooled by their domain name!
Every generation of Grandpas claim the winters were colder and the fish were larger then when they were kids. I won't be fooled into believing climate change and fish population collapse!
Maybe every generation of graduates is getting less employable.
To add what you said, the poll asks: " 25% state that all recent college graduate hires worked out well, while 62% mention that only some were successful. Further, 14% report that only a few or none of the hires were successful."
The interpretation of result depends on what "some" means, it could be reasonably be 50%, 75%, 85%, or 95%. If it's 50%, it seems bad. If it's above 75%, that's pretty good overall,
One good thing about most college graduates is that they can generally learn new things quickly, especially if they’re willing to put in some effort.
There is a lot of truth to this, in my experience. Larger companies (F500) have formalized rotational programs for new grads which sets them up for success, but they can only take a limited amount of grads and almost no middle + small companies have anything similar.
The corporate culture of hiring new grads seemed to die in the GFC of 2008. Companies thought it would be too great a risk to hire someone with no experience, so they would have job postings for candidates with "2 to 5 years of experience." This is also why we have a perpetual talent shortage in that demographic, bc everyone wanst them and there isn't a new pipeline of young people to back fill that range.
Companies are not hesitant to hire only:
- 25 with 10y exp
- no kids
- no plans for family
- keen to unpaid overtime
- no vacations planned
- underpaid and happy
Kind of ppl. Who would have thought ?
Complaints against self absorbed and lazy millennials have been an annoying trope for my entire professional life.
The ancient Greeks complained thier kids were disrespecting them.
I do enough work with new grads to feel comfortable declaring the kids are alright. Gen Z doesn’t feel different fundamentally from millennials to me. We’ve had good (mostly) and bad hires over time. College hires (really any early in career hires) have more variability over experienced hires because they may not belong in it profession they’ve chosen, but that’s been true over time.
The one really shocking number is the 6/10 have fired a recent grad. Given how hard it is to get rid of someone generally that is a huge number.
FWIW, the last firing of a new hire I was remotely a part of involved a Gen x or elder millennial woman who could not behave appropriately at work and managed to document her inappropriate behavior on company IT assets.
I could see this as a first step towards some more interesting work and data collection, but can't imagine there is any actual signal here worth writing about.
The worst thing they do is say no.
When I was a student I was hanging out in an IRC room for discussion of SELinux, asking questions. One night a Red Hatter PMd me and invited me to apply for a job, which was an exciting thing because I'd never been asked to apply for a job before. But my heart sank because the job ad had a huge list of requirements, so I regretfully informed the guy that I couldn't apply because I did not have enough years of experience. He just laughed and said there were probably five people on the planet who actually met those job requirements and told me to apply anyway.
In the end I didn't because I wasn't actually finished with the degree at that time, but the way he treated the job ad as a bit of a joke was definitely a useful life lesson. Job ads are often not written by the people who want to hire, so a lot gets lost in translation.
For those two reasons, a real estate office is a bad example of the dynamics of hiring junior (high skill) CS graduates IMHO
I agree that companies do a poor job of advertising and screening for skills that they really need. Guessing, it might have to do with HR or worse, bad-intention managers, copying the habits of other hiring practices blindly.
Alternatively having a real apprenticeship program developed for tech would be super useful, but we hate it when we try to do real engineer things.
Or twenty-five years ago about Gen X.
It's just an article about "how older people tend to feel about hiring new college grads". There's nothing new about Gen Z that makes them somehow "less hireable".