Let’s Be Frank: The Kids Are Alright

You have all heard the anecdote about boiling frogs: Try to drop a frog in boiling water, and that frog will jump right out. But put him in cool water and slowly increase the temperature, and the frog will stay until he boils.

It turns out that is not specifically true; if the heating is very, very gradual, then according to some 19th-century experiments, sometimes frogs did stay in the water. But, for the most part, frogs, like us, will change location to moderate temperature if required. Even if that change is slow, our bodies (and frogs, from what I read) will still detect that increase and decide if we are still comfortable or if we need to get out.

I am going to run with the original anecdote, though, as it sometimes serves a useful purpose like many myths (See “Let’s Be Frank: The “Myths” of Company Culture,” published December 2022).

I have had a gradually increasing feeling that maybe we are all a little like those (fantasy) frogs right now, merrily kicking around, unaware that the water temperature is rising until we find ourselves in situations we didn’t intend to be in.

I find I tend to have an overall sense of optimism in life, but when it comes to specifics, especially in my own career, I tend to be a hardcore pessimist. I usually assume the worst thing I can dream up is what will happen and then plan accordingly. It tends to keep me from being too surprised when things go south, but it can also bend all narratives to meet my sense of foreboding, especially if I am having issues in some elements of my life.

However, even I am growing increasingly frustrated at the endless pessimism that we get sold daily since whatever marketer it was, way back when, who figured out that fear sells (I actually looked it up – apparently, “fear” in advertising started in the 1920s when Listerine created mouthwash as a way to combat bad breath. The initial advertising campaign centered around a beautiful female character named Jane, who struggled to get married because of her bad breath. Listerine’s revenue took off, rising from $115,000 to $8 million in the next seven years, and marketers have been using fear ever since).

This is especially true with the pessimism right now around our youngest generation (Generation Z - born between 1997 and the early 2010s) entering the workforce. In fact, what got me going was reading an article that used the “boiling frog” analogy regarding Gen Z entering the workforce and companies having to fire them shortly after that.

Gee whiz, fear monger much?

The article referenced research by an online platform (Intelligent.com), in which 1,000 hiring managers were surveyed in August of 2024. They found that 1 in 6 were reluctant to hire Gen Z employees, and around 6 in 10 companies reported firing a recent university graduate they had hired this year. It appears from the data that all the surveyed companies were from the tech and IT sectors, but the article and multiple others using this data set make it sound like it was all across the board, all industries.

The multiple articles that ran with this data as a starting point didn’t have anything nice to say about Gen Z overall and tended to be rather unkind when it came to the habits, etiquette, and potentially moral fortitude of these young people.

Why we think trash-talking our own kids will get us anywhere is beyond me. I remember being told my generation was useless in the 80s and 90s. It did not endear me to my seniors, nor did it prove to be useful information to me.

I want to start bending this narrative, and I will start with a story of my own. I spent some time working this past summer with a young person between university years (engineering) who was hired as a “summer student” at a petrochemical plant.

Was this kid a perfect fit for the job? No. Did he really know anything useful yet? No. Was he socially awkward? Yes. Was he unsure how to have “normal” interactions in the workplace? Yes.

However, he was eager, he took direction, and he would ask for clarification on how to do things if he wasn’t sure. He did a lot of good work over the summer; you could see him change and adapt to this new environment.

For me, it rapidly went from “This guy is going to be a pain in the ass” to “Thanks for updating all that RBI data in the inspection test plans we are working on.” I have to admit I was a bit biased going in, mostly based on anecdotes and articles that didn’t serve a useful purpose other than making me fear the capability of our youngest working generation. But after seeing what this student was like, I soon was trying to help mentor him in areas I was familiar with.

Instead of our current gloom and doom trend, why not start walking the narrative back again and away from fear? Not just with our young workers, but with everything. I am not saying to sugarcoat everything, but maybe my news feed doesn’t need to have endless articles about how close we are to nuclear Armageddon because someone in North Korea farted the wrong way (or whatever scary titles/personas/locales they want to use).

As a new employee, what would you think and feel right now, reading and hearing how useless your generation was from multiple “news” sources online? Pretty bad, I am sure.

But alas, fear does sell, and clickbait articles make money (and apparently suck me in as well – I didn’t go read the article because it was titled “Gen Z – Working out in the Workforce with Good Mentoring!” or something like that).

From the Wikipedia article “Boiling Frog:”

“The story has been retold many times and used to illustrate widely varying viewpoints: in 1960 about warning against those who wished for detente during the Cold War; in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization anticipated by survivalists; in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change and staying in abusive relationships. It has also been used by libertarians to warn about the slow erosion of civil liberties.”

I will close with this: maybe let’s quit trash-talking our children as they enter the workforce and put some effort into making sure we engage with them instead. It seems odd to me when the “master chef” blames his ingredients rather than maybe admitting they are too lazy, too scared, and too inept to change.

Or that maybe the systems we have built do have issues…

I found this bit from an old New York Times article that I think sums up my point:

“WIXOM, Mich., May 29—The older workers at the Ford auto plant here like to tell about the young kid, fresh from high school getting his first taste of work on the assembly line.

The foreman told him to watch a 15‐year veteran weld the sections of the bodies together.

The youth watched the white sparks cascade around the welder. “Do those things hurt?” he asked. The old timer opened his shirt and showed him the scars on his chest and neck where he had been burned in the past.

“Forget it,” the young man said. He turned in his overalls and he hasn’t been back since.

The younger generation, which has already shaken the campuses, is showing signs of restlessness in the plants of industrial America.

Many young workers are calling for immediate changes in working conditions and are rejecting the disciplines of factory work that older workers have accepted as routine.”

(Source: “Young Workers Are Raising Voices to Demand Factory and Union Changes” by Agis Salpukas, Special to The New York Times, June 1, 1970.)

My apologies to The Who for stealing their song title-whose generation, by the way, was also going to be the downfall of Western civilization in their time. Although maybe the hippies did ruin everything…