I often tell my buddies that I want to be a rock star in lifelong learning (the field I work in.) I recently saw that my online Gen X buddy Jason Seiden apparently wants to be a super agent (and the video below is what my 9-year-old daughter would call the most awesome of awesomeness). What do you want to be?
2 comments:
macgruber!
A couple of things about the video.....
It's pretty funny, on the surface, however, it's not really funny and I don't appreciate the underlying message after I thinking about it for a few hours.
First, what he's proposing is the standard "success through promotion" or "success through career" models that have been foisted upon us by the Boomers since day one. Well, cool, you got the band back together, and the band may be a better route for personal success/happiness than occupying a cubicle.
Second, I think Jason is a little out of touch with how most corporations really work. Most of the time, a complaint about a manager in an exit interview is summarily ignored. Most companies will bend over backwards to protect a shitty manager for YEARS, rather than admit they made a mistake in placing an unqualified person in the position, or the manager is blatantly dishonest about what he/she reports to up to his or her management.
Finally, how much emphasis did he place on appearance? First, bongwater85 might be a crack Java developer or game programmer or SQL admin. Second, the young lady who was given quite the sexist treatment may be looking at facebook all day because her sexist managers won't give her any difficult assignments because she's "just a girl". I've seen both happen in my time, where perfectly capable and even the more qualified candidates are excused and dismissed because they didn't fit an image. The results didn't actually matter, it was just the appearance of professionalism that counted.
Remember the dot com era? Remember when, and even now at some of the survivors like Google and Apple, employees show up in jeans, ride scooters around the campus and aren't afraid to hide the piercings and ink? Isn't this what Gen X was about: success on our terms and happiness on our terms, and not necessarily on the model that the Boomers put forth as the correct path?
I'm sorry to have to say this, but Jason is being a douche, and he's perpetuating things in the work place that have long since needed to die.
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