I was watching the local news the other night, when I recognized a girl I went to high school with. She was talking about her difficulty in finding a job after graduating.

One thing that caught my eye in the story was a Craigslist posting from another young person that said, “Experienced, Intelligent and Punctual College Grad Needs work ANYWHERE…Please, for the love of God, give me a job!”

I recognize that when times are tough, one is fortunate to hold down steady employment. And I’m quite pleased that I do. But begging on Craigslist? Really? How about writing a resume, hitting the streets, and getting a job? That might show some initiative, much less the experience and intelligence you’re claiming to show.

I hated to see this story for a number of reasons:

First, I hate human interest stories. They bore me. I want to know about politics and world events (you know, news!) when I watch the news.

Second, it reflects poorly upon me. When recent graduates are portrayed as a bunch of sniveling, whiny losers who beg for jobs instead of getting off our asses and earning employment, it makes me look bad by association.

Third, it’s so incredibly, pathetically “woe is me.” It’s tough out there right now. I see that. So, stop crying and do something about it. Do something to illustrate your value to a potential employer. (Here’s a hint: Complaining that things are hard is not a valuable job skill.)

Please know, whatever else you know, that my generation, as a whole, is not cut from this mold. Some of us are too busy working to have the time to beg on Craigslist or film our sob stories for the news. So, don’t settle for someone who is begging for a job. Don’t settle for that. Look for someone who is working hard and making the best of their situation instead of whining about it. They’re out there.

A friend of mine recently received an offer to accept a new position in his company. It was a position with numerous new responsibilities and requirements. But it didn’t come with a pay raise.

(I know that times are tough and can see the rationale behind a pay freeze, but I’m not entirely willing to concede that accepting new responsibilities and receiving compensation for that violates the idea behind a pay freeze. But that’s a semantic question for another day.)

The problem I’m more interested in addressing came up when my friend balked at the idea of accepting a bunch of new responsibilities and exactly zero new pay. His bosses told him that it would show that he was a company man. They said it would help him build credibility within the company.

This wasn’t the first friend I’ve ever seen go through this. Another of my friends was asked to put in a few eighty hour weeks on a special assignment without any additional recompense. His bosses told him that he was building “name leverage” or some kind of stupid non-tangible concept like it. He asked them point blank: “Can I buy food with name leverage?” Of course not. He knew it and they knew it.

What I want to know is if this is a a tactic that is used only with young people, or if they try to throw this kind of crap at older employees, too?

I’ve never heard of and simply can’t imagine someone saying this to a 50-year-old manager:

“Bob, you’ve been with us for twenty years, and we were hoping that you could take a bit more time away from the kids, because we know you’re working to provide for them and they’d definitely be benefited if you had a bit more name leverage.”

You know what that kind of request says to me: “We own you, and you’re too young to know any better, so bend over and get used to it.”

My response to that sentiment is to write my resume and start sending that bad boy out. If you won’t pay me more to accept extra responsibilities, someone else will. Moreover, it’s insulting that you’re constantly cramming  productivity down my throat as the reason I can’t have a raise, and then when you ask me to step into a more productive position, you still tell me I can’t have a raise. Even more so given that I get the feeling you’re just trying to put this one over me since I’m relatively inexperienced.

Am I completely off base here? Is this something that managers only use with young employees, or is “name leverage” some kind of currency offered to people of any age but accepted by exactly zero retailers of repute (or ill repute, for that matter)?

Last night, I was scheduled to be out the door at 9:30 pm. The way I saw it, that gave me just enough time to watch the last five minutes of the Nuggets game, which, from the looks of the box score and Eric’s morning-after analysis, was an extremely exciting game. And if you can read between the lines, you know that last sentence means I didn’t get to watch any of the game.

Why?

As we were walking out the door, one of the managers walked up to me and a couple of my co-workers and said, “I need you to help me move all this stuff.”

Let me back up about two and a half hours to 7:00 pm, when there was no one in the store. No one. Seems like a good time to be moving stuff, right? Well, that’s what we thought, too, but the first we heard of it was at 9:29 pm when we tried to walk out the door. Ultimately, it took us a half hour to move all the junk.

So, you’ve got me and a few angry co-workers leaving a half hour late and missing an exciting playoff game to do something that even someone with limited foresight could have assigned two hours before, and you know what words we never heard: “Please” and “Thank you.”

I walked away from the store angry. In the first place, it was complete BS that we were required to help with this when it wasn’t our fault that the manager responsible didn’t bother to communicate the issue to the earlier staff in the day. That we had to miss the small bit of the game that we were counting on seeing rubbed salt in the wound. And to not even get the basic courtesy of a “please” or “thank you” just added insult to injury.

I understand that there are times when I’ll be called upon to do something extra. I get it. It’s a dynamic world, and if you can’t roll with it you’ll be left behind. I can handle that, and I can handle pitching in in unexpected ways at unexpected times.

• What I can’t handle is being treated like solving the problems your poor planning created is somehow a part of my job.
• What I can’t handle is being treated like someone who didn’t have anything better to be doing.
• What I can’t handle is not even getting the slightest bit of recognition that what I did was above and beyond the call of duty and made a significant difference in your night.

If you look, you’ll find that more often than not your Generation Y employees are willing to go the extra mile if it’s needed. But if you don’t recognize that they’re doing something extra, or at the very least ask them politely for their help on some above-and-beyond task, they won’t go the extra mile for you. Instead, they’ll go down the block and get work with someone who will recognize their efforts.

On Saturday, one of the lead managers at my retail job was discussing the performance of one of the managers he supervises. He was very upset because the manager came in at 7 a.m. and left at 4 p.m. (per his schedule) on a Saturday, despite the fact that Saturday is the biggest sales day.

Later that day, my manager and I were having a discussion, and he said, “I thought it was a great idea when they moved me to a salaried position. But this week I’m going to make about $7.00/hour. Welcome to management and the sixty hour work week!” He was smiling when he said it, but you could see that he died a little inside every time he thought about it.

I saw these exact same scenarios play out in restaurant work, too.

So here’s the punchline: Seeing these interactions kills any ambition I might have to advance into those positions.

Sure, a salary is nice in the sense that it’s guaranteed money. But if it comes at the expense of being told that putting in a 9 hour day isn’t enough or working for a wage that gets smaller each hour of the week, it’s not even remotely worth it.

As an hourly employee, I knew I wouldn’t be in for more than 40 hours in a given week, lest some unfortunate manager get a tongue lashing for allowing me five minutes of overtime. What’s more, I knew that if I left at the time I was scheduled to leave, no one was going to get bent out of shape.

I have no idea why companies continue to think that moving into management requires a level of “commitment” that involves sacrificing any attempt at a day-to-day life outside of work, accepting a continually decreasing wage, and basically being willing to think of the health of the business as the single most important aspect of your entire life.

What I can see is why there are so many unhappy young managers out there.

I stayed with the same employer from the time I was in my junior year through my junior year of college. Quite clearly, then, there were some incentives for me to stay. And no, none was a pension. So, let’s consider a few of those:

1. The people I worked with were awesome. I would have been out the door a dozen times if it weren’t for the fact that I was working with people I enjoyed being around, who supported me, developed me, and related to me. My peers and my supervisors were both important contributors in this regard. To give you an idea of what a large role the people I worked with played for me: To this day, I still hang out on a regular basis with people who I worked with there.

2. My schedule was flexible. Flexibility was incredibly important to my work schedule, and it still is. In a given week in high school, I might have a family obligation, a sports event, practice most afternoons, some sort of homework or exam to prepare for, and a couple work shifts for which I was scheduled. Oh, and I was sort of interested in having a life, too. So, if there was a concert I wanted to attend, for instance, I was able to work that out with the boss. That flexibility kept me there because it meant that (a) I could accomplish the things I wanted to and (b) my boss didn’t make me feel like my job was a part of my goals, instead of an obstacle to accomplishing them.

3. I was recognized for what I did well. Without trying to brag (OK, maybe just a bit), I managed to pull in a couple awards, a couple special assignments, a promotion, and a number of complimentary reviews that were coupled with pay increases. I knew that what I accomplished there was making a difference to the company, and that the difference I was making would be rewarded.

4. I got to eat for free. I can’t stress this one enough: Starving student + Free food = Match made in Heaven.

So, those are four reasons I stayed with one employer for a long time.

Ask your long-term employees why they’ve hung around for so long, then work to create those kind of perks for all of your employees.

Eric recently posted on a gentleman who worked at the same company for 59 years. No, that is not a typo. 59 years.

If your mind isn’t already boggled, allow me to put this in a little perspective

• This man worked at his job for 2.7 times longer than I have been alive.

• I have held seven jobs since my sophomore year of high school, not counting odd work done here and there for a day or two.

So, that kind of loyalty is really a monumental achievement.

One response to this story that I found interesting was a commenter on Eric’s post who said:

“Amazing and we have to deal with people who will quit if they don’t get saturday off for a concert.”

That’s some beat-down brutality right there! Some young people just got put in their place.

Or did they?

People respond to incentives. It’s a basic tenet of economics because it’s a basic fact of life. And let’s face it, my generation simply doesn’t have very many incentives to stay somewhere for a long time. Especially if that somewhere isn’t fitting into the overall scheme of our lives. Pensions and retirement plans have gone the way of the dodo. I don’t even expect to ever have post-employment benefits.

In fact, the only incentive at any job I’ve held that was designed specifically to reward staying for a long-term that I can even think of  is eligibility to earn vacation hours after a year working. But let’s consider if this is really an incentive. Let’s assume I make $8.00/hr, and that I work 25 hours per week. If, after a year of work, I am eligible to begin earning vacation hours at the rate of two weeks per year, that means that after my first two years at that job, my incentive for staying for two years is $400. (I have earned two 25  hour weeks worth of pay at $8.00/hr, or $400.) Assuming I work 50 weeks per year, a different employer would only have to offer me a $0.32/hour raise to match that reward in half the time. So, let’s stop pretending that a sixteen year old kid working in a restaurant for some spare cash before he goes to college is going to commit to you because you have a vacation package that the guy down the street can double with $0.32.

This just illustrates what you already know: the business world has changed from the days when the financial resources existed to create the kinds of long-term benefits that would keep an employee for 20 or 30 years. I’m fine with that. It’s the world I grew up in, and I’ve never known it another way. What that means on the employer side of the equation is that to keep me for a long term, employers will have to earn my loyalty somehow.

You might be thinking that “loyalty” isn’t the right word here, and that a word like “commitment” might be better. After all, if your loyalty can be purchased, it isn’t loyalty at all. So, allow me to further clarify the question I’ll be addressing in my next post: If you don’t have enough money to purchase someone’s commitment, what can you do to earn his loyalty?

With that said, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not Generation Y received a legitimate flogging from the comment.

Tell me if you’ve ever been here:

Friday morning, we have a meeting. Things are going swimmingly, until a handout comes out, covered in acronyms I’m unfamiliar with. Some are easy enough to figure out based on context, but there are a couple that are completely foreign to me. Everyone else is sitting there,  using them with the same ease that I’ll employ various “colorful” expressions on a Saturday night with the guys.

And I have no idea what this meeting is now talking about.

Panic moment, right? I don’t want to look like a fool. Especially when it turns out to be something that every educated person should know.

So, what should I do?

Wait!

The coffee shop two floors down had free Wi-Fi. If I can connect to that, I’ll be able to Google the term and figure out what we’re talking about.

Connecting to network… Good.

Signal “Very Weak”… Uh-oh.

Connected… Score!

One 15 second Google search later, I knew what the acronym meant and was able to pretend I knew all along.

The Morals of the Story

1. If I happen to be plugging away at the keyboard during a meeting, it’s quite possible that I’m doing something work related. I can listen and type at the same time, so don’t assume that I’m not paying attention.

2. No wonder I always want to have my phone, laptop, and other toys with me.

3. No wonder I don’t particularly like asking questions in a group. I’m not used to doing it.