Is social media a driving factor in the labor shortage

[Shaun @ Tru6]

By shortage I am referring to the lack of young people who want to work, take pride in their work and have s sense of self invested in their profession. And for me personally/professionally, jobs that focus on working with your hands are the last thing young people want to do today, it seems.

It's of course a very complex issue with inputs from COViD to parenting to technology, etc.

I think one factor is the very real sense of self-esteem derived from a job/career has been replaced by a false sense of self-esteem created and perpetuated by social media producing a self that has no adult foundation, nothing to build upon or spark drive and ambition, and therefore grow.

Just a thought to expand on or controvert.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Shaun @ Tru6

By shortage I am referring to the lack of young people who want to work, take pride in their work and have s sense of self invested in their profession..

I know plenty of adults whose only motivation to work is the paycheck. I’ve hired some of them. My mistake (and perhaps yours) is that I assumed everyone had a sense of entrepreneurship or agency in what they do. There are plenty of people out there of all ages who just want to be told what to do and how much they’ll get paid - they don’t give a damn about the quality of their work.

[LEAKYSEALS951]

I'd say that downward spiral started long ago, and today is the latest chapter of a continuum, of which I am guilty of being a member of.

I can keep "ahead" by being one step less pathetic than the younger generation following me.

And... the "older" generation ahead of me. They are hitting curmudgeon status. Like a car going out of warranty and holding up 100k over what was ever expected, or skylab falling out of orbit, or voyager finally crapping out, impressive as they are, their curmudgeon heat shields are failing.

What amazes me though, are the silent success stories, the younger generation standouts that actually did something, holding their head low, and keeping their eye on target. They are out there, just a little (very) harder to spot.

Freakin' gunners. They are out there.

[908/930]

Pretty sure social media has not helped, have you heard the term quiet quitting? With parents raising them to be snowflakes never mind the fact that they know it all and just bad attitude, I can think of one that is on this forum.

[A930Rocket]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

…
There are plenty of people out there of all ages who just want to be told what to do and how much they’ll get paid - they don’t give a damn about the quality of their work.

I see this all the time in construction. People do the bare minimum and have a little pride in their work.

Integrity, is doing the right thing, when nobody sees it. I do this all the time, because if I see it, I assume others will see it.

Today, we were punching out a house, and the electrician went up into the attic scuttle hole. When he did, he stepped on the closet shelving, damaging it. Of course he didn’t tell anybody.

[Jeff Alton]

The lack of labor and the level at which they perform comes down to crappy parenting and lack of mentors for those in the age group. Don't blame the current generation entering or recently entered (relativiely speaking) for that, blame their parents.

[Gogar]

I've always liked this one with Simon Sinek and Tom Bilyeu. It hits on a lot of points that you may find related to your question.

The part about jobs starts right around 8:00 but it's worth it to watch the whole thing to get the context of the job part.

It's a few years old now but I think it still applies to any generation from the Self Esteem generation on down.

[Tobra]

Jeff hits it right on the head

[rfuerst911sc]

Good parenting is hard to measure but is so critical . It doesn’t guarantee success but it sure helps . Discipline and work ethics are learned if taught and reinforced . Without it you start losing folks very early in life . For a variety of reasons a lot of young people just are lost on what they want to be when " they grow up " . Without a goal/target its easy to just do enough to get by . But doing just enough to get by rarely puts you on a path for success .

[jcommin]

The work force has certainly evolved as well as their involvement.

Some just want to punch in/punch out, make rate. Where I worked for 35 years many hourly people had 2 jobs and manage a family.

Quietly quitting is certainly real but that's all on the worker. Headcount reductions just move the workload onto those that remain. So, the person cherry picks what to do or can't do the job well. I call it meatball surgery, just enough to solve the problem because of time. This was very prevalent during the last 15 years of my career. I was often asked: give me your 2-year productivity savings by EOD. Then the expectation was to meet it.

My personal favorite is strategic incompetence. This is where a person does something so bad you don't ask them to do it again but not bad enough to terminate them. (BTW, we are all guilty of this in our lifetime).

[jhynesrockmtn]

I think it goes deeper. The loss of old school middle class jobs is creating a group of folks trying to survive on what used to be part time jobs for teens. The work ethic thing is real in many ways as well. I don't think social media is a cause, but it's an amplifier. We got a long letter in our paper (we get a physical paper Wed and Sunday) from the "paper girl". It was full of "this is how hard my job is bull". Okay, your job sucks. I get it. How about instead of writing me a letter about it, you train for a better one.

[Pazuzu]

The youths of today THINK in a completely different manner than the 40+ crowd.

We (old people) learned things as layers, you start with a basic base, then add to it, where each layer was more complex but smaller, and eventually ended in some sort of peak, which was "complete mastery of XYZ skill or curriculum". We were raised to build one, maybe two of these pyramids for our lives, and our employment and livelihood were pretty well based on those piles that we built. We learned by books and memorization, by classroom courses that were level 1, then 2, then 3. The entire structure of how we think and learn was based on this layered pyramid style. Also, if we wanted to research something, you pretty well had to start at the basics which were not that hard to find in a library, and then those basic resources led you to the higher level sources, but those became harder and find (first your local library, then a college library, then a specialized tech library, etc). You needed to go through the steps yourself to gain a high level of knowledge of something, and you had to be acceptably successful at each level before you could really try the next level.

Once kids had access to the interwebs, they started learning in a completely new way. Information at all levels was suddenly free and open. This changed things in a few key ways. First, you had access to all levels of knowledge of a subject at all times, which meant you could drive right to the high level stuff without putting the "work" into it. Second, that knowledge was readily available at all times and everywhere, which meant you didn't really have to be an expert or memorize something, you just needed to be an expert at *finding* something. Knowledge was no longer something you built up and hoarded in your brain, it was instead a menu that you could go back to at any time. Third, knowledge on the interwebs is very LATERAL, meaning bits of knowledge and information are linked sideways to other bits, crossing disciplines. Suddenly, where WE had our knowledge as these layered pyramids, the kids have knowledge as a thin spiderweb, or maybe a crystal lattice. They now learn a massive range of information, but none of it is that deep or complex, because they can always just find the resource that tells them the deep and complex parts.


So, we grew up being told to get a job, stay there for 30 years, go up the ranks, show initiative, be proud of your work because it's a legacy, basically we were told to walk up that pyramid we had built. Even cartoons of work life were people climbing mountains.

The kids now instead view work as a lattice of events, things to experience, connected by threads. They don't want to stay at one job for 30 years, they want 30 jobs for one year each. They want to experience a wide range of things, but never too deeply. Why spend too much time learning one thing or doing one job when there are hundreds more things or jobs out there waiting to be experienced?


The problem is that (for now) the business/corporate works is still run and designed by old people, so the young people are lost. They simply don't know how to climb a pyramid, but they know how to find them, and how to design them, and how to draw them, and how to talk about them, and how to measure them, and how to video them, and how to build a game around them, but not how to climb them.

Give it another 10-15 years, and us old people will be gone. The youths will then be able to rebuild the corporate world in THEIR style. People won't have a job, everyone will do 6-10 different things a week for 6-10 different companies, getting paid gig type pay for each. Piles upon piles of spiderwebs of skills all interlaced. Things will still get done just fine, but to someone today, it would be totally alien.

[Arizona_928]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

I know plenty of adults whose only motivation to work is the paycheck. I’ve hired some of them. My mistake (and perhaps yours) is that I assumed everyone had a sense of entrepreneurship or agency in what they do. There are plenty of people out there of all ages who just want to be told what to do and how much they’ll get paid - they don’t give a damn about the quality of their work.

I know a union guy at gm who openly states. “You can make me show up but you can’t make me work”. He’ll waste a whole day on a ticket chasing a dead end and watch Netflix on his phone. That guy is in his 50’s and makes 6 figures with the mandatory overtime.

The Mexican plants is a good example of your second point. They show up, work a year and leave. Just there to collect a paycheck and the plant suffers from QC issues and we buy poor built cars for 40k.

[Tobra]

So what I am getting is things will still get done, but nobody will be very good at anything, because they don't have the attention span to work at something enough to become better at it.

That fits pretty well with experience.

[Arizona_928]

Social media is beautiful. It’s propaganda.

Kids think they are gonna go to college and have a bunch of high paying jobs…
Kids think of relationships differently due to social media…
Kids think they can get free money by having MH issues.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

The youths of today THINK in a completely different manner than the 40+ crowd.

We (old people) learned things as layers, you start with a basic base, then add to it, where each layer was more complex but smaller, and eventually ended in some sort of peak, which was "complete mastery of XYZ skill or curriculum". We were raised to build one, maybe two of these pyramids for our lives, and our employment and livelihood were pretty well based on those piles that we built. We learned by books and memorization, by classroom courses that were level 1, then 2, then 3. The entire structure of how we think and learn was based on this layered pyramid style. Also, if we wanted to research something, you pretty well had to start at the basics which were not that hard to find in a library, and then those basic resources led you to the higher level sources, but those became harder and find (first your local library, then a college library, then a specialized tech library, etc). You needed to go through the steps yourself to gain a high level of knowledge of something, and you had to be acceptably successful at each level before you could really try the next level.

Once kids had access to the interwebs, they started learning in a completely new way. Information at all levels was suddenly free and open. This changed things in a few key ways. First, you had access to all levels of knowledge of a subject at all times, which meant you could drive right to the high level stuff without putting the "work" into it. Second, that knowledge was readily available at all times and everywhere, which meant you didn't really have to be an expert or memorize something, you just needed to be an expert at *finding* something. Knowledge was no longer something you built up and hoarded in your brain, it was instead a menu that you could go back to at any time. Third, knowledge on the interwebs is very LATERAL, meaning bits of knowledge and information are linked sideways to other bits, crossing disciplines. Suddenly, where WE had our knowledge as these layered pyramids, the kids have knowledge as a thin spiderweb, or maybe a crystal lattice. They now learn a massive range of information, but none of it is that deep or complex, because they can always just find the resource that tells them the deep and complex parts.


So, we grew up being told to get a job, stay there for 30 years, go up the ranks, show initiative, be proud of your work because it's a legacy, basically we were told to walk up that pyramid we had built. Even cartoons of work life were people climbing mountains.

The kids now instead view work as a lattice of events, things to experience, connected by threads. They don't want to stay at one job for 30 years, they want 30 jobs for one year each. They want to experience a wide range of things, but never too deeply. Why spend too much time learning one thing or doing one job when there are hundreds more things or jobs out there waiting to be experienced?


The problem is that (for now) the business/corporate works is still run and designed by old people, so the young people are lost. They simply don't know how to climb a pyramid, but they know how to find them, and how to design them, and how to draw them, and how to talk about them, and how to measure them, and how to video them, and how to build a game around them, but not how to climb them.

Give it another 10-15 years, and us old people will be gone. The youths will then be able to rebuild the corporate world in THEIR style. People won't have a job, everyone will do 6-10 different things a week for 6-10 different companies, getting paid gig type pay for each. Piles upon piles of spiderwebs of skills all interlaced. Things will still get done just fine, but to someone today, it would be totally alien.

Interesting perspectives, thanks for posting. A lot to digest.

I'm a serial entrepreneur so I should be able to identify with this theory but don't. But them I'm old school Yankee/Chinese/Japanese (taking a little from each) in terms of work ethic.

[Seahawk]

Great thread.

I had a similar discussion with my son, who will be 30 soon.

He said something interesting: "I had internet but I wasn't OF the internet...that has all changed."

The parent angle is apt: How, and I could not be more serious, a parent that doesn't have a weekly punch list for their kids to accomplish when they are young, then make them get jobs in the summers in HS and college, are doing them a disservice.

I learned everything I needed to know helping my family and getting out in the work environment very early...so did both of my children.

One last thing: In the past five years we have had to ask job applicants not to bring their parents, one or both, with them to the interview.

Can you imagine? I would have been mortified.

[rcooled]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

In the past five years we have had to ask job applicants not to bring their parents, one or both, with them to the interview

When I first heard about this recent trend, I thought it was a joke.

Sadly, it's not...

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

I learned everything I needed to know helping my family and getting out in the work environment very early...so did both of my children.

That was my experience also. I was doing paying work outside the family by the time I was 14. I don't know how that drive was instilled in me. It has served me well.

Originally Posted by Seahawk

The parent angle is apt: How, and I could not be more serious, a parent that doesn't have a weekly punch list for their kids to accomplish when they are young, then make them get jobs in the summers in HS and college, are doing them a disservice.

I'm not sure I follow, but I would think how a parent that doesn't have a weekly punch list for their kids to accomplish when they are young, then make them get jobs in the summers in HS and college, is NOT doing them a disservice. I kind of think that's what you meant.

That was my attitude, anyway. But I had a friend who didn't demand her sons do in-home chores. She didn't want her sons to have summer jobs when in high school because he needed to have experiences. They each spent a summer in Europe - all expense paid. At age 18 one of them spent a month on some kind of extreme youth camping thing - an entire month in the Alaskan wilderness. I thought they would turn out to be a couple of entitled Karens.

By age 24 this one was in charge of Target store's in store graphics. At 26 he finished second in some kind of Asian reality TV show about buying and flipping apartments. I don't know what he is doing now, or where in the world he is living, but his upbringing sure didn't hurt him.

The other went off to Asia to be a model/actor/cinematographer, and appeared on TV shows and commercials and works in the Asian film industry.

There is no accounting how drive and ambition are instilled in a kid.

I do not have the answer.

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

I'm not sure I follow, but I would think how a parent that doesn't have a weekly punch list for their kids to accomplish when they are young, then make them get jobs in the summers in HS and college, is NOT doing them a disservice. I kind of think that's what you meant.

I did. That part of my post was poorly written.

All my friends and I had jobs early and often and we were all middle class or in some cases upper middle class.

My son's friends from HS and college still like to come here and work, mostly mowing and moving stuff with the front end loaders. One of them, a USMC Yankee pilot just transferred to Quantico and told me: "I'm back"!