As I scan my LinkedIn feed, I’ve noticed a trend that torques me off pretty good. It usually looks something like advice for millennials by a non-millennial who assumes that millennials need the advice. The famed Avocado Toast Article that says Millennials don’t buy houses because they overspend on coffee drinks and unnecessary breakfast food items is possibly the most horrible example of this.

Other notable types of “advice” that I see regularly have to do with how this generation needs to behave to integrate into a workplace (because they somehow need remedial instructions?) with such helpful sections as “Stop Complaining”. I get especially angry when I see LinkedIn users piling onto the comment section about how true and important that advice is. When I see these comments I instinctively respond with a one word “Nope!”. It keeps me from becoming waaay more unprofessional.

Originally for this piece I wanted to do some data analysis and conduct some sentiment analysis of comments and activity feeds from Twitter and LinkedIn to see if this was just my perception or not. I think this is still an interesting exercise and may do it eventually but when I thought more about it I got to the real reason it makes me angry.

I’m a Gen X’er by birthdate and I have a very strong memory of someone handing me 13th Gen my sophomore year of college. Overall it’s an interesting book, and I won’t go into detail here, but suffice to say people my age were analyzed by the historic and cultural factors that influenced us and boiled down, very unscientifically, to a generalized stereotype based on that. Literally nobody I knew fit the mold presented in that book yet it defined us to so many managers at the time.

Why are we eating our own young? Why are we setting up the next generations to be labeled, tagged and defined well before they arrive? Are we nothing more than marketing segments anymore? The personas that we use when developing user stories and epics are helpful templates but never to be confused with the actual lives and realities of the people we serve. Aren’t there far more important problems to solve like the fact that women are still hugely underrepresented in tech? Or the people of color are in our industry at numbers far lower than they should be?

I’m extremely proud to work someplace that’s intentionally hired a mix of generations across the board. The Millennials on the teams I have had the privilege to work on have been awesome contributors. They bring different sets of strengths and perspective to the team based on their background, education and experiences. Basically they are human, just like a Gen Xer, just like a Boomer and just like the people who will come after them. All of us may have come of age at a different point in history but it doesn’t give those of us who did so sooner the right to lecture anyone. I’m certain I’ve learned far more from millenials than they have from me.

I hope that people who seem to be drawn to the idea that they should provide advice to the younger generations find the humility to resist that. Until then I will continue to “Nope” the comments and articles that grind my gears on this topic. I may even spend a morning making avocado toast for everyone in the office just to be contrary.

Avocado Toast