Are people today, especially younger generations, less willing to work hard and sacrifice for their jobs than in the past?

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

This generation is entitled about work-life balance; while building your career you should work extremely hard

There's an age for everything and nothing is a handout

Scope: valuing work-life balance is fine at other life stages

38:12 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

Harry Stebbings · Feb 22, 2023

Millennial operators are soft and quit when things get hard, retreating to comfortable big-tech jobs

He has seen three cases where founders/operators bailed back to Facebook PM roles once it got difficult

Scope: says it self-implicatingly as a millennial himself

55:25 20VC: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger on Why Social Networks Should Be Less Social & The Next Wave of Social | Why San Francisco Will Return with a Vengeance and The Future For Remote Work | Let's Get Personal: Relationships to Money, Be

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

An employee leaving Artifact because he 'felt like he was being told to do his homework before he could play' is the most entitled, quintessentially millennial thing he's heard in his career

55:38 20VC: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger on Why Social Networks Should Be Less Social & The Next Wave of Social | Why San Francisco Will Return with a Vengeance and The Future For Remote Work | Let's Get Personal: Relationships to Money, Be

Harry Stebbings · Mar 31, 2023 · hedged

The current generation is afraid to do the work, with post-COVID remote norms, Friday afternoons off and slow Monday mornings replacing the hard work of the 1990s

Scope: acknowledges he sounds like a boomer and gets in trouble for saying it

16:30 20VC: The Secret to Negotiating; Making $50BN for Yahoo on Alibaba | Why Everything You Know About Hiring is Wrong; Domain Knowledge and Past Experience are Dangerous | The Next 10 Years for Fintech; Winners, Losers and Crypto with Jackie Reses, CEO @ Lea

Harry Stebbings · Sep 11, 2024

Young people today do not want to work or sacrifice the way they used to, and the few who do tend to be founders — a shrinking number

Scope: framed as his own challenge/observation

20:27 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Harry Stebbings · Jan 13, 2023

The boom produced a generation of entitled and poor-quality startup team members

28:38 20VC: WTF is Going On in VC? Are VCs Still Investing? How Has What VCs Want in Investments Changed? Are LPs Investing in New Funds? Why VCs That Invest in Public Markets Are Losers? Dec 2023; Will It Be Better Or Worse with Jason Lemkin

Jean-Denis Greze · Jul 21, 2023

Many tech employees relate to their employer the way a French citizen relates to the French government — as an entitled beneficiary rather than a participant

Scope: framed as applying to 'many' tech employees

0:00 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai

Jackie Reses · Mar 31, 2023

Whether people do the work depends on the culture you build, not the generation: you must avoid building entitlements into how you operate, set the foundations with your first 20 hires, and weed out people who miss goals

Managers have the responsibility to set goals and OKRs that drive the team forward, and mission-driven cultures get people to volunteer extraordinary effort — as when the whole of Square volunteered as PPP loan reviewers around the clock

16:52 Culture not generation determines whether people work hard

Michael Eisenberg · Jun 19, 2024

Young people will surprise us and become an incredible generation, contrary to fears that they are too absorbed in TikTok and Instagram

Watching how young Israelis went out to fight for their brothers and sisters over the last year; similar forces are at play in Ukraine and elsewhere

49:12 Young people will rise to the occasion in crisis contrary to doubts about their character

Amjad Masad · Mar 10, 2023

The current generation's unwillingness to work hard stems from cultural decadence — a belief that life is about pleasure and passive consumption — and fixing it requires a spiritual reform that re-establishes the value of making things

Pleasure is fleeting and is not what makes life meaningful; past cultures such as twentieth-century America held values of hard work and exceptionalism

12:13 Cultural decadence explains declining work ethic requiring spiritual reform

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

There are still plenty of people willing to work extremely hard, including non-founders who see partnering with founders as a privilege — and some founders don't want to work hard either

His job was to put the engineers' 'artwork' on every refrigerator in the world, and people exist who see that mission as a privilege worth the effort

20:39 Plenty of people including non founders still willing to work hard for a mission

Harry Stebbings · Oct 24, 2022

The retreat from perk-driven employee entitlement is driven by job insecurity rather than any genuine cultural shift

When half your friendship group loses their jobs, you become grateful just to have a job and stop caring about perks

38:23 Job insecurity not cultural shift explains the retreat from perk driven entitlement