Zoomers Have Figured Out Early That Being a Manager Sucks

It seems Gen Z wants nothing to do with the management hamster wheel. Good for them.

Business Insider shares the story of a few young people who took one look at the management suite and said eff that. Including this young millennial who didn’t want her job to find out she was talking shit to business rags about it:

Wendy, 28, who isn’t sharing her surname to keep her workplace from identifying her, told Business Insider the apparent promotion was pitched to her as an opportunity. She said she agreed at the time but now thought she was naive about what she was really being offered.

“In my head, I was like, ‘Great, awesome, this is a step up, it’ll look good on my résumé,’ and blah, blah, blah,” she said. “But then, when I really thought about it, I’m doing way more, I’m not even getting paid more, and I just feel like I’m stressing myself out more than I have to.”

The “stress and anxiety” she was experiencing was at an “unnecessary” level, Wendy said.

“It just didn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “I would rather go back to doing what I was doing for less stress and just getting paid for what I was doing.”

This attitude, which we feel compelled to point out started in earnest with now-elderly millennials back when we were the spry younguns corporate America was terrified about, reflects strongly in our own sector where promises of one day making it to partner if only you grind hard enough stopped motivating people long ago. Remember this guy?

“One of the key problems for professional service firms is that many associates simply no longer want to make partner. And if the major carrot you’re dangling in front of everybody’s nose suddenly doesn’t seem so appetizing any more, you need to think very hard about what motivates people to deliver the kind of work that is expected of them.

“That career typically means very long hours, lots of personal sacrifices, typically a poor work/life balance. I hear time and again from senior associates: ‘Why should I work so hard only to get permission to work even harder?’

Or these people?

This will be a huge problem in about ten years when there are so few willing managers under the age of 50 but whatever, perhaps technology will have rendered the middle manager extinct by then.