Millenials grow weary of job offers

First, a disclaimer: I am not in the technology industry. That will likely never change. I have no experienced the things discussed in an Atlantic piece entitled, “Imagine Getting 30 Job Offers a Month (It Isn’t As Awesome As You Think).” So it’s entirely possible that my response to the post is unjustified, ignorant, and hyper-reactive. 

The article opens with one of the more opaque demonstrations of inflated self importance that you will see in big-market journalism. An accomplished software developer, whom the article calls a “celebrity” in certain circles, receives an email from a GroupOn employment recruiter. The email is polite (as the article admits), and meekly asks if the developer would be interested in a career at GroupOn, and if so, would he please forward a resume. 

If that sounds like an offensive email, then I recommend you unplug. But here’s the thing: The developer in question apparently designed an open-source “framework” that is widely used by websites, one of which is (you guessed it) GroupOn. And so the recruiter has the embarrassing responsibility of, in the words of the Atlantic, “[asking] for a resume that would prove [the developer’s] skills as a junior developer on the framework he had created.”

So that’s funny, right? An amusing story of yet another company that didn’t quite do enough research. But instead of laughing off the incident, the Atlantic uses it as a lead into a story about how young tech professionals are on the “spammy side” of job recruitment.

It is articles like this that furnish ammo to those writers who critique the millenial tendency of inflated self-worth, poor work ethic and sense of entitlement. If one tires of too many job offers, an effective solution might be to swap places with any one of millions of college graduates, who (obviously due to lack of foresight on the part of them or their parents)  are effectively forced to work the minimum wage to make the balance on student loans. 

This sounds like a rant. Well, sorry about that. But I’d rather be found yelling at the kids to get off my lawn than complaining that the lawn was too green and thick for my plush bottom to lie in.