A Curse for Generation Y

If Generation X has the curse of having too much perspective on the significance of the Internet, then Generation Y’s plague is having none whatsoever. You can see this now as kids who grew up on MySpace enter the workforce and crash headlong into a very simple fact: putting your entire life online can put your job on the line.

An example of this kind of stupidity happened this week, when a software programmer did very real damage to the company he works for by whining and exaggerating on his personal — but public — blog. I won’t name either the blogger or the company because this is much ado about nothing, bringing headaches to his innocent coworkers and supervisors, who have had to deal with the media and industry fallout.

The basics are these: Mr. Fresh Out Of College And Unable To Understand That All Jobs In Your Early 20’s Suck was feeling grumpy, so he jumped online and started blogging away about the horrible condition the company was in. The things he said had a grain of truth to them, but misrepresented the facts and caused a PR firestorm. Luckily most of the industry news sources that have picked up the story have looked at both sides of the story, giving some higher-ups the chance to provide hard data refuting his whiny claims. The blogger himself retracted the post, saying he felt bad and blaming his rant on “a bad day.”

No harm done, right? Wrong! Here’s where I turn my attention to you. Yes, you, Blogger McJackass. Why? Well, first of all, Google cached the post, so everyone can still read it. You spread misinformation about the company you work for, potentially damaging its stock value. You have wasted company resources by yanking people away from actual tasks that add to the company’s value and made them waste time on defusing this mess. It wouldn’t be hard to do some math and calculate how much you cost the company. You were having a bad day? That’s an excuse? You’re lucky I’m not your boss, because I’d fire you. And then laugh while you were astonished by your inability to find another company willing to hire you.

This is part of a larger problem of permanent adolescence and lack of responsibility that clings to Generation Y like those a pair of nasty tight Emo jeans. To quote a friend of mine who runs a software company:

What they don’t realize is that when someone goes in for a job interview, it is now common for the prospective employer to look them up on MySpace, Facebook, etc. They have put public information out there, so the employer wants to see how they comport themselves.

The crappy part is that the brightest kids with the most cutting edge understanding of code that software companies want to hire are ridiculously young. They’ve spent all of their adolescent lives blogging away under the happy delusion that what they say doesn’t have any consequences. Although they’re technically adults, college provides some prolonged insulation from the reality that your words are real, they mean something, and they can have impact beyond your pimped-out MySpace profile. Coders straight out of college have no conception of how one irrational digital rant can have a very real impact on business.

The blogger took down the post, but the damage is done; he has hurt the company he works for, caused a firestorm over a non-issue, and left a huge dent in his professional reputation. Next time he’s job hunting, a prospective employer will be able to see that if he’s having a bad day, he might just stab the company, his coworkers, and the shareholders in the back because he doesn’t understand the relationship between publishing words and people being able to read them.

Generation Y: you have real jobs now. Realize that you should act conscientiously, think beyond yourself, and if you do not take responsibility for your actions, you will endure embarrassment, damage to your reputation, and cause nothing but collateral damage to your friends and coworkers. Personal responsibility sucks, huh? I have only one sensitive, caring, thoughtful thing to say about that: tough.