I work in the federal government. When we had mandatory return to work five days a week earlier this year combined with “the fork” (the name given to the “fork in the road” email from the DOGE team offering pay for several months, with promised future separation date and no need to actually work in the interim) it was interesting to see who took it. Most were people planning to retire soon or happened to have found another job anyway already. But a surprisingly large cohort were Gen Z. When I asked them why (to me this was a scary risk, with no guarantee of future job or health benefits, so as part of their exit interviews I wanted to make sure they understood the ramifications and what would happen after their last day) they pretty much all told me they didn’t want to come in to the office five days a week, it interferes with the way they wanted to live their lives. And while I commend their bravery and confidence - I 100% would not have felt confident jumping without a parachute - I wonder how smart a choice it was in this job climate. A few are using the opportunity for wholesale career changes to try a different sector, at least one is going back to school, but the others are just hoping to “find something better.” These are full on adults who likely wouldn’t appreciate me worrying for them, but I will, nonetheless (particularly the 26 yo who didn’t seem to have a plan other than “not this” and whose parents are both deceased and who didn’t seem to have any external support system - I wasn’t close enough to her to keep in contact, but I think about her often).
That used to be the case. When I started meeting people from the City back in the 90s, the vast majority were Oxbridge grads (including in majors like history). Times have marched on, thankfully (and I say that as a graduate degree holder of one of those). Maybe the prospective employers picked up on the sense of entitlement: generally not a valued trait in employees.
My older Gen Z son chases gang members through dark apartment complexes in the middle of the night. I would pay good money to have one of these young adults ride along with him for a shift. Imagine what they’d do when someone spit on them. 
Also I think that sense of entitlement goes down even worse with employers once you get away from the London/Oxford/Cambridge area (apparently now referred to as the Golden Triangle, though I suspect no one thought about that being a notorious drug production area). Quite a few of these young adults came from other parts of the country and went back there after college to job hunt.
I would never in a million years have gone back home to my poverty stricken home town (not that there were any jobs there anyway). But just like in many parts of the US, moving back home after college seems more common nowadays because salaries are low and rents are so expensive (and perhaps kids don’t feel so desperate to get away from living with their parents).
This article (gift link) highlights accusations that posh students at elite universities are engaging in “accent bias” and reflects the resentment against entitled Oxbridge graduates in much of the country:
Mocked for using the wrong spoon: working-class life at top universities
Were they raised in upper middle class environments where expectations and aspirations were high, and obstacles were few (and pushed away by connected parents)?
Except for the few who make it into the true upper class, most will see some form of downward mobility (there is a lot more room for downward mobility for them) that may seem like a shocking surprise to them.
Yeah. I think until you’ve actually spent time in the UK, it’s hard to fathom how deeply embedded class divisions are in society there, and that’s even despite the top universities making a concerted effort to increase their intake of state school students. I think it’s less obvious at postgrad level (probably half my class were from outside the UK, so there were many accents of all sorts, and only a handful of the UK students interestingly had done undergrad at Oxbridge.) The most glaring example of how deep the class ideology goes was when someone who described herself as an avowed socialist dismissed someone’s family wealth as “nouveau riche”!
I lost my northern accent very quickly and was highly amused in my second year when my tutor’s secretary asked if I was from Surrey. But you really have to live in a bubble if you are going to engage in “accent bias” at Durham!
Couple of notes based off my kids’ experience.
I was afraid to post about younger S, but it appears he is safe from the 3rd round of layoffs this year. They lost about 10-15% of their company earlier this year. They let go roughly 6% today. S’s area was hit pretty good today. They are a federal contractor with roughly 10,000 employees (according to Google). I hope this will be the last.
Older S OTOH - at a large financial company - said they can’t hire people fast enough. Their onboarding class of new grads is the biggest ever. However, he did say that they had to close their application portal after 1-2 days because they were flooded with apps. I believe he said 4000 in 1 day.
My D was at a leadership conference today and one of the break out sessions was about the generation gap at work. One of the points she thought found interesting was that for the age group that was in high school during the Covid years, the vast majority never had the typical summer jobs that their previous cohort held. As a result, those students hit college lacking some of the soft skills that kids even a few years older possessed, and that put them at a disadvantage in finding college internships. The speaker’s main point was that there needed to be more robust company onboarding and training, a willingness to do more remedial training for students without work experience, coupled with more understanding from the older generations of the unique challenges this cohort faced.
My daughter is also doing her first recruiting trip of the season in a month. She said she’d share her detailed impressions from that trip and I’ll report back here.
That describes my younger ds to a T. Add in the fact that he is almost a year younger and naturally introverted, and Covid restrictions really took a toll. He was in grade 11 when the shut downs occurred and he missed out on his grade 12 year.
We wanted him to be able to experience a more traditional “university experience” so paid for him to live in residence for first year. Well Covid restrictions were still on and many of his classes were hybrid and social events were curtailed. He might as well have been living at home so that was a bust. As a result he didn’t really start coming out of his shell and making social connections until his 4th year. He was so ready to be done with school at that point, but socially, he probably could have benefited from an extra year which he would have had had he been able to secure an internship. Unfortunately he did not and he graduated with 0 work experience.
Fortunately he did manage to land a job and it’s with a small start up which is allowing him to really get to know his colleagues and to stretch his wings. I think he would have been lost in a large organization. This is the perfect work environment for him right now. Also being a very small company it’s forcing him to have to be very adaptable and a bit of a jack of all trades. He’s developing good flexibility skills.
Today marks his 1 month anniversary on the job and he must be doing ok because his boss just told him he was going to give him a $5/hr raise. He’s also been taking on additional responsibilities beyond the scope of the role he was hired for.
This is a comment from an article about Oracle. It’s perhaps telling for CS grads.
The job cuts, affecting hundreds of positions primarily in India and the United States, target the Enterprise Engineering division, Fusion ERP teams, and data center operations staff. However, this isn’t a retreat from cloud computing as Oracle is simultaneously hiring new talent with AI-specific skills to support its growing focus on machine learning infrastructure.
My daughter is home this weekend and we were talking job market with her as she’s getting ready for her first recruiting trip of the season next month. Her #1 piece of advice continues to be to talk to the companies that have no lines at the career fairs. If a company is at a job fair, it means they are hiring and just because a student hasn’t heard of them, doesn’t mean they aren’t a great place to work.
My D’s company is a multi billion dollar global company, but one that no one has heard of because it’s their products that go into all the household names. Tell your kids to not discount those companies they’ve never heard of! These are sometimes the best places to work, the most recession proof, and they treat their employees well.
This is great advice. My son is graduating next year and I know he has attended many on campus career fairs. I will be sure to share this with him.
This is so true. When I got my MBA, I went to a regional career fair so it had 8 or 12 schools there - and one company I most wanted to target had such a long line, that if I had waited, I would have talked to a lot less companies.
I ended up finding my job at a competitor to that company that had barely a line…and talked to many others that I did follow ups with.
In the case of career fairs, quantity over quality for sure (and you don’t even know the quality of anyone). If you have a name you want to talk to but it will take too much time, apply on line. And if the school has a guide and lists a name on the guide (some do in handshake), then you can reach out to them privately.
Good point! Also, its very important to remember that in almost all cases, ones’s first job will not be their last , and the knowledge/experience they gain in one job may be exactly what another company needs down the road. That was entirely true for both of my s’s and for many other young adults I know.
May be this is somewhat major dependent? CS career fairs have been totally useless unless it’s an invite only event and the company has pre-selected who they want to talk with.
This is from an economist at Ramp - a fintech company
Thx for sharing. I think part of it is the immigration crackdown. Less customers. Less white collar needed to support immigrant workers. I know by me, roofers, builders and others can’t find labor.
We discussed this some more and what’s most interesting is that the entry level salaries have gone up by ~25% since he joined but the billing rates have only gone up by ~10%. That has compressed the pay scales and whereas the most junior people used to be the most profitable, now it’s people who have been there 2-4 years who are most profitable. When those junior people are also working fewer hours than they used to it throws off the company’s whole business model and makes it harder to justify hiring them.
His view is that part of it is that the entry level salaries are now high enough in many parts of the country that there’s not much incentive to work hard and get promoted, whereas he had a big incentive to earn a $10K or $20K pay rise because he was spending nearly half of his starting salary on rent. His salary has gone up ~60% in three years, now the plausible increase if you work hard is only ~30% and people may not want the stress.