Can’t believe the millennial bashing here. Sadly most of you don’t have a clue.
Like me, you grew up with cushy jobs, health benefits, pension plans etc. Like you I was able to start saving early. My first job in 86 I had a company car that was paid in full including maintenece and insurance, full 100% paid insurance and a 100% employer paid disability plan.. That does not happen today
Todays millennials have non of that. My niece and her husband pay over $800 per month for a $5000 deductible health plan and their company picks up the rest. No pension plan. Yeah they have a 401k but that is really self paid retirement.
I won’t mention their competition with HB-1 workers, high priced homes, offshoring of jobs, outrageous car prices and repair bills.
Back when I was in college you could work summers and part of fall and pay your entire tuition for the school year.
Don’t get me startred with employers who will not even open your resume unless you have a 4 year degree.
We had it easy compared to millennials.
I agree. I remember the days when an employer actually gave you health benefits AND paid into one’s 401K. They called it a “matching plan”. Not anymore.
>>Like me, you grew up with cushy jobs, health benefits, pension plans etc. <<
The hell I did. I worked damn hard to overcome poverty, graduate from college with a MEANINGFUL and USEFUL degree, mastered my craft and continue to work to stay on top of it. I eventually went private and deliver EASILY $2 of value for every dollar I bill.
Any M willing to apply him/herself can do the same. And I know MANY, all of who accepted traditional values of promptness and hard work and eschewed the M culture who are succeeding (b/c they emulate people who succeed),
So speak for yourself about how easy things were. Good for you that you fell into a featherbed. Few did.
“Like me, you grew up with cushy jobs, health benefits, pension plans etc.”
I grew up with none of that. I saved anyway. I worked for myself from age 26 on. It worked out, eventually.
Why is everyone so mentally convinced they can’t succeed these days? Why do people ignore the incredible rate of tech advance which will continue to open opportunities unheard of at this time? This is a time of upheaval and upheaval brings opportunity, every time.
“...My niece and her husband pay over $800 per month for a $5000 deductible health plan...”
Sounds like Obamacare. Who’d they vote for?
“Like me, you grew up with cushy jobs, health benefits, pension plans etc”
Bullshit. I left the Corps and dropped right back into the teeth of the Carter years. Inflation at 10%, prime rates above that, gas prices doubling overnight.
I’ve known nothing but 401k plans except for a very brief stint working for County government. The health plans we had, and I emphasize had, were 80/20 and that was back when it was cheap. The last employer health plan we had cost is $1,400 a month for a family of 3.
We are where we are today, which ain’t ShangrifriggingLa btw, by being prudent with our money, prepping for the inevitable hard times, and busting our asses working 10-12 hour days for the last 25 years.
So spare me.
L
We had it different.
I got into IT a decade before the personal computer revolution. We were still programming for the mainframe in PL/1, COBOL, JCL, ISAM, VSAM, IMS, tapes, and mass storage drives. Those jobs needed college degrees because the science was still being invented.
In the 1990s, the personal computer advanced enough to replace the mainframe, and distributed computing became the norm. PowerBuilder, Composer, Visual Basic, DB2, SQL. Everyone became a coder, and processing was pushed to the desktop with client-server architectures. Mainframes were decommissioned, and entire remote support companies disappeared.
In the 2000s, the nature of work changed. With the advent of companies like SAP, all the programs that needed coding had been coded. Companies that had their own internally-developed general ledger, procurement, HR, inventory, sales, etc., systems, all moved to a common ERP platform. Colleges moved away from teaching 3GL and 4GL programming and started teaching SAP configuration.
Now, internal IT is being outsourced to "off prem" cloud services, software as a service, platform as a service, corporate datacenters are being sold to cloud providers and the computing leased back to the corporations.
It wasn't "easy" for us, just different challenges for different times. It's possible that the choices that millennials made were not informed by the life challenges that we had to face, or the stories of the life challenges that our parents and grandparents passed onto us.
-PJ
lucky you I started work in 79 and had no free car, no insurance, no disability, no pension plan. I have a clue, I went to work every day and did not bitch about how tough it was. Now retired at 62 after working and paying for my own car and insurance for 40 years, mortgage and kids university.
Glad you had it easy.
My greatest objection to all the millennial bashing is this: who is responsible for the millennials being the way they are, assuming they’re all just so bad? If the kids suck, aren’t the parents at least partly to blame? The previous generations failed to preserve the values, knowledge and integrity that this country had previously, so now we have a generation of kids who don’t know their asses from their elbows. That is OUR failure, not theirs.
Hear, hear!!!