- Flipping burgers is "opportunity."
Yes, maybe in the past a strong recommendation from a manager at a high school job could help you get a post-graduation job. Today, do any colleges even consider this? In the time you work flipping burgers, you could just as easily become leader of 12 after-school activities that look "impressive" on a resume.
Who's to blame for that? Today's lazy kids? Or the generation of boomer hiring managers and admissions committees who look for "upside potential" instead of work ethic?
- Bosses will expect you to work harder than teachers.
Not in my experience. Most of my college-graduate friends have post-graduation jobs where they have no impact on the company's success, and do mostly busywork filling out forms and going through the motions. Flipping burgers, at least you can show some hustle, being nicer and faster and more careful than your peers. Same in most tech jobs. But if your job is to fill out paperwork and answer the phones and no one supervises you, how do you measure doing "better"? And why care if your supervisor can't tell either?
So who is to blame here? Lazy kids? Or boomer corporate structures that doesn't give junior employees even the smallest responsibility for trying hard, doesn't mentor them to work harder or more intelligently, and then promotes those people into management jobs where they continue to not help the next generation?
I think the real problem here is the Boomers: they rejected the idea of listening to their parents' generation when they entered the workforce, and they seriously screwed things up. Today, most businesses expect a high school or college grad to already know how to work hard, how to give good customer service, how to prioritize business goals. Where would they have learned this? Historically, by working a job in school and then being intensively trained when they start full time. Today, there is no similar process unless you go into a field controlled by a strong professional society (doctor, pilot, etc.).
Go find an old 1920's or 50's book (or instructional video) on management. The younger employee, although not comptent or hard-working, is thought of as a project that the manager has to look in on, give advice to, occasionally challenge. How many places today will spend that time on someone just out of high school or college?