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"I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial."

Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.

I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely.

"I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..."

That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person.

Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.

This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.

Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability.

Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history.

Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.

I agree, I didn't call him entitled either. Maybe he lacked training or maybe not, and maybe he saved well or maybe not (he did last for 18 months in SF after he was laid off, after all).

No, I wouldn't call him entitled. If anything, I think he was deceived: he bought in to a social contract and it turned out he was more invested in it than his employer was.

Just to clarify: I wasn't saying you'd called him entitled. I'd just felt the need to expand upon that point, because the words "entitle" or "entitled" appear about 12 times on this comments page already, and are bound to appear even more. I sort of picked that section of your comment as a segue into discussing the entitlement topic. Sincere apologies to you if I gave you the impression that I was accusing you of labeling the guy entitled.

> Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time [...] We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it.

Millennials need to learn some history.

A 52-year-old graduated high school in 1980. They grew up, then worked their first decade, during the economically scariest 20 year period between the Depression and the Recession.

Millennials don't even know what a pension is, let alone having to worry about losing one, or fear the Japanese taking over the world, including both the high-end and low-end manufacturing jobs along with Rockefeller Center.

It was pretty terrifying back then for your rank-and-file blue collar worker, and it didn't let up until the mid 90s. Anyone born around and after 1970 doesn't know "normal."

Thank you for providing some perspective.

When I heard people say how hard Millennials have it I think to myself "harder than the 17 and 18 year olds who went off to fight in WW2?" or "harder than my grandfather who jumped on a freight train at the age of 16 to find work during the depression?"

These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too.

Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times.

Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......

Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans.

edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.

What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?

No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)

Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?

No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine.

Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.

Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side?

It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?

Well, you could just get a degree in CS :)

In all seriousness, I don't really have any advice about it, except to say, skills pay the bills. Marketing yourself is great but IMO you are better off taking the time gathering expertise in your field. There's a book on this topic called "So Good they Can't Ignore You" that I highly recommend.

I have a degree in CS. I also had 3 years experience as a professional programmer when I was laid off. Let me be clear: resume spamming does not work. I was on unemployment which requires documentation, so I know that for 9 months, I applied to a minimum of one job per week. In that time I got only 3 calls back and one interview. Fortunately I interview very well :)

I'm a grown adult who is perfectly capable of maintaining a savings account and investing in a network of peers who I could ask for help with acquiring another job. Why should that be my employer's responsibility?

That is demonstrably insufficient. From the article: "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do". This guy had tons of contacts and a savings account, and he ended up homeless.

Lots of "perfectly capable of adults" maintain a savings account and cultivate a network they think can fall back on in hard times. Far fewer than you think are able to save enough or have that network come through. In fact, assuming one's savings account is large enough, or one's network is strong enough, is an assumption born of privilege few, even in America, ever know.

At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.

There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.

It does happen to some people.

There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible.

If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.

Absolutely, it can happen to anyone, whether you're a "good citizen" or not.

Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).

Because this view of reality was the American dream promised (literally and figuratively) by politicians, companies, churches, schools, families and advertisements in the 20th century.

You might not hear those words from a millenial, but I’ve heard many millenials complaining that their philosophy degree didn’t get them a well-paying job, or that it’s unfair for employers to expect them to already know how to do a job before hiring them. It feels like a similar mentality, just under different circumstances. (I don’t really buy into the whole “if only they’d worked harder/been smarter/prepared themselves better, they wouldn’t be in this situation” story line, but I also believe that thinking of yourself as a victim is counterproductive.)

As a millennial, your attitude doesn't help you one bit. You're still unemployed, or slaving away at short term jobs with no upward mobility--you've just never known any better. Maybe his attitude smacks of "entitlement" (what a dirty word!) but at least he had the opportunity to work in an America where companies had to care at least a little about their employees (because outsourcing and automation had yet to destroy opportunities for ordinary people). So who exactly is the sucker?

Of course there's a social contract. We also have laws against burglary even if you leave your front door unlocked. There's a limit to how much people are allowed to screw you. If someone takes an action that results in you losing your house, that person is an asshole even if they're not technically a criminal.

My impression is that most of the mandatory phase of education in the US teaches this lesson. It was well into my 20s that I really realized that I was taught wrong.

>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy.

Or maybe the world used to be different, and the millennials are being released into a world of unemployment and a largely dismantled safety net. The generation gap has narrowed for them, largely because they're still living with their parents after college.

>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial.

I have heard these words coming from a millennial. The thought process isn't related to age, it is related to the mindset that karma is real: if I do good things then good things will happen to me.

People eat it up because nobody likes to see bad things happen to good people.

You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.

To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.

People can and do get laid off in the US with no severance.

First, from the article, he looked for a job for 18 months with solid experience but without success. Second, having been there, if you think going from a couple K a month while supporting a child instantly down to a couple hundred a week is simples, you haven't been there.