It's a Mad, Mad World
I heard three different stories today:
An HR automation system a friend worked on in his company automatically filtered out any applicant above 40.
An underclassman, still on his first job, was on the brink of dismissal because he kept doing his job wrong but the boss never told him why or how to fix them.
Another underclassman was forced to join her boss' favorite sports club as a volunteer event organizer, working weekends and after hours. Her reluctance was painted as unprofessionalism.
I couldn't help but think of how crazy dysfunctional our working system is right now. Entry level jobs and internships demand such a stringent set of requirements that they filtered out many many many bright young people. HR forwarded me a selection of would-be interns and it was scary for me how every single one of them had prestigious internships every semester from the beginning of their college career. I was someone who worked all throughout college! And I did that because I had to! Now it's like you're going to be punished for behaving like a normal young adult, going on trips with friends instead of taking notes in an accounting firm.
That's not even counting the fight they have to go through, going against many people laid off in recent years.
But once you're in, ... Once upon a time you would expect getting primed for your roles. Set up for success. But on-the-job trainings increasingly disappear off the map, applicants fully expected to be "workplace-ready" fresh out of school. Onboarding tells you the most rudimentary procedures and amounts to an elaborate "good luck figuring things out yourself". Every job post wants someone self-sufficient, fast learner, ...because otherwise no one's going to show you the ropes. Getting a good mentor early on really makes a difference.
Speaking of mentorship... Yeah, the whole class of people with experience? Gone, gone, gone, because these days if you're over 30 you're just useless. Or maybe they just want a host of impressionable youngsters who wouldn't mind trading a little bit of equity with a ping pong table and unlimited supply of kombucha. Wrong. Even youngsters nowadays know the value of cash over perks, especially if the company can just vanish overnight. But the experienced people, people who have set things up and know the best practices, they're just banished from the workplace.
So it's up to you to learn how to work, and some people get really good at it you think they have it in the bag. But then something happens and the cracks are now visible, leaving you to wonder how people who hadn't known the fundamentals could make it to Senior level. A whole generation gaslighting themselves that they could work and everything's alright. A self-learner who taught the newbies to self-learn, and decades of best practices recorded in the field going down the drain.
Or the senior is swamped with so much work to do it's easier for them to take on the task themselves than teaching the newbie, something that Fred Brooks had written almost thirty years ago now.
Talent Development in HR nowadays, if they even exist in a company, amounts to pushing people to take on dubious third-party courses on their own time. Sometimes even on the employees' own resources. You have to keep afloat of your industry tech and standards, just not on company time. All this in a mad world preferring to hire externally rather than promote internally.
Somehow, the cure of this all (as touted on many media) is for you to take the initiative and upskill constantly. Spend all your time on chasing one thing after another to make yourself employable. I like learning new things and have tried a wide array of activities on a whim. It saddens me that the notion of personal development is steadily reduced into something you do in pursuit of capitalist frameworks. Everything has to be sold in terms of "salary boosting potential", even college majors!
It's your fault, somehow, for being lazy. You little company drone, you, you have no right to bitch if you haven't used 24/7 to work, think about work, or work to get work.
God forbid if you have hobbies.
I'm sorry, I don't know you're still on pager duty tonight. Every night. Somehow you're also expected to be available because professionalism requires those hours to bleed out, out, out until the universe is painted in the color of your cubicle.
I'm sorry, you don't even get a cubicle anymore, eh?
If you're lucky, maybe in twenty years you'll get a little corner of your own, whittling the days away while assuring the new junior worker you know what you're talking about.