According to Fortune (because who better to trust the folks who’d sell their integrity for a seat at the yacht party), Gen Z’ers are apparently the absolute worst to hire.

They are a flaming HR disaster apparently.

Six in ten employers say that they’re already handing these digital newborns their pink slips, before the ink even dries on their university diplomas, and one in six managers would rather set their hiring budget on fire than hire another post-2012 womb-evacuee.

So what in the actual hell is happening here?

Let’s start with the obvious.

Gen Z got landed on earth somewhere between 1997 and 2012. They are raised in the warm, algorithmic embrace of the internet, and these poor bastards got a dopamine-laced-IV-drip by TikTok and were babysat by YouTube.

They saw more of PewDiePie than their own grandparents.

They were reared on screens, drip-fed likes, and socially conditioned to respond to texts with “k”. And surprise, surprise, now they don’t want to play make-believe in open-plan offices or pretend to care about Linda from Accounts’ baby shower.

Yep. That generation.

The one we gave smartphones to at age six, then gaslit for being “addicted”.

The one that watched their schools turn into militarized fortresses, their futures evaporate in debt, and their dreams drowned by a rising sea of unpaid internships. But suuuere, let’s blame them for being unprepared for the workplace.

That’ll fix it.

Apparently, three-quarters of companies say their Gen Z hires are “unsatisfactory”. Now that is a word that’s usually reserved for moldy hotel rooms and Tinder dates who show up in cargo shorts.

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Let’s analyze the employer complaints.

Those lil’ b’ards:

• Are unprofessional (wears hoodies and doesn’t pretend to care about quarterly KPIs)
• And unorganized (doesn’t live by Outlook calendar invites)
• Are very poor at communication (refuses to lie in meetings like we do)
• And don’t take initiative (won’t do unpaid labor at 9 PM to impress a sociopathic boss)

So yes, apparently this generation has terrible work ethics.

Or maybe the entire rotting, Kafkaesque structure of work itself is a relic from the industrial age, held together with the toxic positivity which we call office-culture.

I mean, hear me out.

I get it.

We were all fed the same vomit sandwich when we were young.

Go to school, get a degree, find a job, suck it up for 50 years, then die with enough savings for one (1) cruise and maybe a decent coffin.

This was The Plan™.

The Path™.

The American nightmare with a LinkedIn profile.

We all bought into it, got spat out by it, and now we expect Gen Z to do the same, but without the pensions, stability, or healthcare.

Sounds really legit now doesn’t it.

Some of the delightful comments under that Fortune piece were your usual boomer poetry.

“This generation is lazy”! or “Blame the parents”!

Ah yes, let’s always blame the parents.

Not the corporations, not the society that monetized every second of childhood, not the gig economy or housing crisis or melting planet. No, it’s Sharon’s fault for not teaching little Logan how to properly brown-nose in his first performance review.

I’m a Gen-Xer.

That cursed middle child of generations.

We were the last ones to get spanked and the first ones to get ghosted by a job via email. We had chores, dial-up internet, and Saturday morning American cartoons and series as our serotonin factory.

We were told that hard work pays off, but what we got instead was a front-row seat to the financial collapse, mass layoffs, and “Fun Fridays” that were just code for unpaid overtime in a conference room with stale cookies.

The last real job I had was such a psychological horror show, that I found myself Googling “symptoms of a stroke” every Monday morning.

My boss was a PowerPoint narcissist, a texting tyrant, and a Zoom diva with the charisma of an expired yogurt. I left that job with high blood pressure, imposter syndrome, and a hatred for Microsoft Teams that runs deeper than my student loans.

And here’s the thing. That organization also lost one of their workers to a stress-induced aneurysm. Caused by the same brand of workplace toxicity that’s sold as “hustle culture”. What happened to her? Can’t say. Legal reasons. But trust me, it was the kind of corporate f*ckery that deserves its own Netflix documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman and backed by Nine Inch Nails.

Heck! It even inspired me to write my first book: “How to survice toxic workplaces”.

Don’t buy the book. I’ll save you your hard earned cash, and give you the TL;DR:

“YOU DON’T”.

Well, not unless you leave.

So when I hear boomers say, “You kids are too soft”!, I want to hand them a job in fast fashion retail and see how long they last.

Yes, some Gen Zers are lazy. But so are half the people over 40 I’ve worked with who haven’t learned how to forward an email without printing it first.

This generation isn’t “anti-work”.

They’re anti-bullshit.

They were raised in a war zone of social media, climate collapse, mass shootings, and pandemic lockdowns. They don’t want to go to the office to sit in a cubicle that smells like Old Spice, cold coffee and regret. And they sure as hell don’t want to make minimum wage to be emotionally waterboarded by management.

Janel Lahbrahmi, who’s a career coach and content creator on TikTok said it best: “millennials were told to follow their passion and get a good job, but passion don’t pay rent”.

Even top performers get axed in layoffs now.

Entrepreneurship sounds nice until it turns into 24/7 grind culture, depression, and unpaid invoices from “collabs” with yoga influencers.

And let’s talk about that word. . . mental health.

This generation isn’t ashamed to say, “My job is ruining my will to live”.

They watched their parents become grey, bitter, broken shells after decades in abusive jobs, forced to beg for vacation days and work through illness like it’s some badge of honor. Gen Z saw that and said Nah. I’m good.

At the same time, they are watching influencers rack in millions by filming themselves making avocado toast on yachts. And suddenly, teaching high school algebra for $38K a year with no dental doesn’t seem like a dream anymore.

Look, not every Gen Z-er is allergic to effort.

Plenty of ‘em are thriving.

But even those who aren’t entitled or lazy still have to survive an economy that pays less than living wage, offers no security, and punishes them for speaking up. So yes, even the most mentally stable among them might need to scream into a pillow before their 10 AM stand-up call.

So what’s next?

Do we keep blaming kids for not wanting to work in the crumbling remnants of late-stage capitalism? Or do we finally admit that the system’s broken beyond repair and maybe the kids are onto something?

Because while Gen Z might not know how to write a cover letter, they sure as hell know that giving away 40 hours a week for a job that could disappear overnight is a fool’s deal.

They are opting out.

And that scares the suits.

The future isn’t corner offices anymore.

Unfortunately, it is decentralized gig work, remote everything, and finding income streams that luckily don’t require a manager breathing down your neck, but I’m pretty sure an AI will soon take his place.

The future is chaotic, unstructured, terrifying, and a hell of a lot more honest.

If Gen Z is rejecting this flaming turd of a system, maybe that’s not failure.

Maybe that’s evolution.

And maybe the rest of us should stop mocking them and start asking, “What took us so damn long to figure it out ourselves”.

Now go ahead, boomers.

Call them soft.

Call them spoiled.

But just know, when the last office light goes out and the coffee machine stops humming, Gen Z will be livestreaming your funeral on Twitch with a crying emoji and a #RIPGrindset.

Signing off from my last perm job.

Marco.

Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?

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I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

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