Real wages are stagnating. Workers are being kept in subsistence. [1]
From my point of view, tech-job market seems to be rigged. There seems to be a huge demand for talent, yet companies willing to pay meaningfully more to attract it are few in between.
which is an utterly useless metric unless it also takes how the world surrounding us has changed. Just from numbers in the article, housing has become 10 times as expensive, and the millenial generation has a significantly higher debt. I didn't know college graduates made 70k in the 60s, it sounds like an absurdly high number and if I were to guess what kind of salary you'd need to have today to have the same lifestyle and financial security I'd say its at least 250k.
You’re mixing inflation adjusted versus non inflation adjusted numbers. $70,000 is adjusted for inflation. Housing costs have increased faster than inflation in some places, but not by a factor of 10. Indeed, nationally, the price per square foot for housing has stayed pretty stable for the last 40 years: https://www.supermoney.com/2019/01/inflation-adjusted-home-p...
There are two aspects to that trend:
1) People are buying bigger houses. That is consistent with the fact that they’re making more money. Instead of just having extra money, they’re buying bigger houses.
2) People are buying new houses in the south, where they’re cheap. That makes sense too. A house in Palo Alto is a lot more than it was in 1970. But Palo Alto wasn’t Palo Alto in 1970. Today it’s East Egg. Your $2.5 million is buying you into a haven for the elite. But back then, it was Round Rock. You were buying into a nice, but otherwise ordinary suburb. You can still buy a nice family house in a good school district for $250,000 in Round Rock.
I couldn't gleam this information easily from the article, but I presume these surveys were given to each age group at the same time.
If that's correct, couldn't age (specifically life experience) play a large factor in the results? Certainly as I get older, my perspective on work -- and everything, really -- has been changing.
> Fortunately, these biases can be modelled, quantified and accounted for. We have taken this into account in our analysis using True Benchmark® technology, so we can be sure to tap into the generational effects.
Not sure what it is but supposedly they accounted for it?
I will note that the boomer data seems oddly noisy compared to other demos.
It also changes with experiences. I used to be SUPER gung ho about work. Dedicated, etc. Then I was laid off.
Changed my whole perspective. Company DOES NOT love you back. If possible, love what you do, and get paid enough to be comfortable.
For instance, my commute matters to me more than just about anything now. I'm 10 minutes from the office and can work from home if I want, and it's actually one of my first thoughts when talking to a recruiter.
Environment matters to some people too more than anything, but for me I want to get along with my boss, like my job most days, not be in the car for an hour a day and get paid enough to pay my bills and have a little extra.
Ouch. Every once in a while I read something that puts things in just the right perspective, and it hurts. You've put that existential angst very succinctly.
Cy Wakeman has an interesting twist on the validity of engagement stats. She claims engagement is more valuable when coming from highly accountable employees (i.e. employees who take ownership of problems). From her perspective, engagement without accountability generates entitlement.
Yup, the renter class extract value (money) during the economic churning cycle. As the money flows back into industries they extract more than is necessary or a reasonable profit.
It is insane that there is a company like Peakon that its only product is related to employee engagement but their own people seems to not be happy (see glassdoor reviews).
This is what happens when management still thinks they can just instill "loyalty" in their employees and we'll happily putt along without raises as they slowly cut more and more benefits and throw more "pizza parties" to compensate.
"Using our cutting edge analysis, we've empirically determined that highly-paid employees looking forward to their fat pensions are more satisfied with their working environment than low-paid employees with no benefits. That'll be $2MM for consulting on intergenerational workplaces, thanks."
The youngest boomer, on these calculations, is 54 going on 55. With some luck he or she has established a career.
At the mid-millenial age of 31, I wasn't happy about my pay, cause it wasn't much, or for part of the time about my work, because it was tedious and needed a change.
The chart that showed which generations work most in which fields showed that gen-X and boomers work in areas that are less precarious than those populated by millennials.
I use the triad of "money, stability, and prestige," to weigh the value of a role. Young people are naturally attracted to the money-prestige roles, where older workers want stability-money roles. People who value prestige-stability roles tend to be in academia, where prestige-money roles are in the arts/media/politics/non-profit sectors. I am sure there is a gender/sex axis for these preferences as well.
In terms of what you need in a role, admit you need prestige to increase your profile that gets access to greater opportunity. Commit to valuing stability if the things that are important to you are not in the marketplace, and if money is truly your goal, recognize it's almost always made by forgoing prestige and stability - those things come after, if at all.
Money and prestige converge as the income gap grows. Also with more consolidation, the concept of stability changes since businesses themselves aren’t as stable as before.
Arguably, prestige is a euphemism for "not worth it," in that it's what people offer you when they don't want to pay market rate. See: title inflation, exposure, opportunity, etc.
When you are making a decision about whether to take a role, stay with your current one, or be content with it, the problem tends to reduce to a balance of these factors. Mistaking one of these for another is the recipe for being unsatisfied.
The article rests on a fundamental logical error. They claim to be measuring “millennials” versus “generation x” versus “baby boomers,” but actually they’re measuring 18-35 year olds, etc. Those are different groups. (Millennials will continue to be millennials even when they’re retired, for example.) Obviously, younger people will have less belief in the organizations mission, for example, since largely they’re still not the ones setting that mission. That doesn’t mean that millennials as a group find work less meaningful than their parents did at the same age.
Indeed, there is reason to believe the opposite. Millennials are generally more conservative than the baby boomers were at the same age: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservati.... That may carry over to attitudes towards things like work.
The article seems to imply direct causation of the results from membership in a 'generation', but it seems much more likely to be the result of length of time spent in the labor market.
Peakon glassdoor reviews on the other hand are the worst. How a company in HR industry can have such review and still offer such weak explanations for employee engagement across different industries, at the same time be compliant to GDPR (i.e.: not have any insight from the data but highly aggregated stats?)
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 81.1 ms ] threadFrom my point of view, tech-job market seems to be rigged. There seems to be a huge demand for talent, yet companies willing to pay meaningfully more to attract it are few in between.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_wages
Millennial households headed by college graduates have an income over $100,000: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-yo.... For the silent generation in 1968, that was under $70,000 (in inflation adjusted dollars).
There are two aspects to that trend:
1) People are buying bigger houses. That is consistent with the fact that they’re making more money. Instead of just having extra money, they’re buying bigger houses.
2) People are buying new houses in the south, where they’re cheap. That makes sense too. A house in Palo Alto is a lot more than it was in 1970. But Palo Alto wasn’t Palo Alto in 1970. Today it’s East Egg. Your $2.5 million is buying you into a haven for the elite. But back then, it was Round Rock. You were buying into a nice, but otherwise ordinary suburb. You can still buy a nice family house in a good school district for $250,000 in Round Rock.
If that's correct, couldn't age (specifically life experience) play a large factor in the results? Certainly as I get older, my perspective on work -- and everything, really -- has been changing.
Not sure what it is but supposedly they accounted for it?
I will note that the boomer data seems oddly noisy compared to other demos.
Changed my whole perspective. Company DOES NOT love you back. If possible, love what you do, and get paid enough to be comfortable.
For instance, my commute matters to me more than just about anything now. I'm 10 minutes from the office and can work from home if I want, and it's actually one of my first thoughts when talking to a recruiter.
Environment matters to some people too more than anything, but for me I want to get along with my boss, like my job most days, not be in the car for an hour a day and get paid enough to pay my bills and have a little extra.
For context I'm 36.
You'd have to be utterly insane to find meaning in that.
What a time to be alive.
At the mid-millenial age of 31, I wasn't happy about my pay, cause it wasn't much, or for part of the time about my work, because it was tedious and needed a change.
I use the triad of "money, stability, and prestige," to weigh the value of a role. Young people are naturally attracted to the money-prestige roles, where older workers want stability-money roles. People who value prestige-stability roles tend to be in academia, where prestige-money roles are in the arts/media/politics/non-profit sectors. I am sure there is a gender/sex axis for these preferences as well.
In terms of what you need in a role, admit you need prestige to increase your profile that gets access to greater opportunity. Commit to valuing stability if the things that are important to you are not in the marketplace, and if money is truly your goal, recognize it's almost always made by forgoing prestige and stability - those things come after, if at all.
When you are making a decision about whether to take a role, stay with your current one, or be content with it, the problem tends to reduce to a balance of these factors. Mistaking one of these for another is the recipe for being unsatisfied.
Indeed, there is reason to believe the opposite. Millennials are generally more conservative than the baby boomers were at the same age: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservati.... That may carry over to attitudes towards things like work.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Peakon-EI_IE12...