Before you get annoyed with Foster over a cherry picked BBC article, read the much more in depth Guardian piece they lifted quotes from. It’ll give you much more context.
Absolutely, here is the part for the lazy:
I should add that, for all her cheerleading of gen Z, Foster isn’t above being irritated by them. “They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’ Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”
“They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.’
lmao, you go kids
Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?
Need to install something in their phones that shocks them when they refuse to use autocorrect
lmao, you go kids
It’s kind of shitty if the rest of your team is there on time. Suddenly everyone else has to work late.
Work-life balance is important, man. I watched my grandfather work himself to the bone for no appreciation for years before he retired. Gen Z not acting like their own wellness is negotiable in a job is a good thing. It’s the job of management to create an environment in which projects have reasonable timelines without having to crack the whip on everyone because one person is taking a half-day for their own sake - and it’s the job of all employees to support and encourage one another to look after their own health first, and the health of their employer’s profits second.
tl;dr; don’t be a dick to your coworkers about it, but absolutely prioritize your own wellness. Also, strengthen unions
I agree that work life balance is important, but if the way you achieve that is by just fucking off at a whim at the 11th hour, you’re doing it wrong.
If you tell management at 10 o’clock that you’re not coming in… When you were supposed to be there at 8, and there are 40 people waiting for you… What is a manager even supposed to do with that? Step into a time machine, go to the past?
The right way to do this is by telling people at least the day before. Then as a GROUP, the remaining people can either plan to work around your absence, or, EVERYONE can sleep in and come later.
The beef here isn’t self care. The beef is doing it in the shittiest way possible.
Management also fires people who can’t respect their teammates by showing up when asked to (and almost certainly is in the contract they signed when getting hired). 9-5 is soooo hard (because I stayed up too late gaming or didn’t leave the bar till 2am, real examples I deal with too often). Do one offs happen because family gets sick or something out of your control happens and you really can’t make it till 10? Sure, but decent people communicate that ahead of time if they can.
And by omitting the ‘cheerleading of gen Z’ from the context of the discussion, you feel this more accurately sums up Fosters overall feelings about Gen Z?
Before you get annoyed with BBC for a cherry picked Guardian title, read the less in depth Guardian article they lifted the title from.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/06/jodie-foster-generation-z-annoying-interview
Guardian Title: “‘There are different ways of being a woman’: Jodie Foster on beauty, bravery, and raising feminist sons”.
BBC Title: “Jodie Foster: Gen Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with”
Conclusion: you’re talking out your arse.
Guardian Title: “Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with”
Conclusion: click my link.
Well played. Goddammit Guardian.
There is a long history of generation gaps. We tend to forget that young people are observing us, but not just to mimic us. To learn from us in many different ways. They’ll take our principles and ideas and push them further, they’ll branch out in new directions when new directions become available, they try to succeed in places where we failed.
This can all be discomfiting when taken together, but it’s exactly what most parents generally want, deep down–for them to have a better life than we did. We can’t really help it if the nuts and bolts of that are uncomfortable and, if we’re being honest, completely terrifying sometimes. In the end though, it comes down to faith. If you raised them right … you might just have to trust them. Not to be perfect and always do the right thing, but to grow, learn from their own mistakes just like we did, and ultimately carve their own path.
We can’t hold them back, trying will only result in strife. This is a key part of how we evolve as social organisms, it’s part of what makes us so adaptable to all the different environments and circumstances of this world. If they always just came out as carbon copies, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish all the stuff we do, as entire civilizations.
We’re gonna need a free and intact world to hand down to them, though, if they’re going to have any kind of real shot at success.
To bring this back to Jodie, if it were an older co-star, would she react the same? Ageism cuts both ways, and when I hear of an actor not showing up on set on time, my first instinct is “douchebag celebrity”, not “kids these days”.
To young people, we do envy you. Time can be an implacable foe, and we’re much closer to face-to-face with it. We do remember what it felt like, and we miss certain parts of it. The same part of a person that wishes they could redo parts of their life, when it looks at your decisions, can become hyper-judgemental. Try to avoid that one, when you get around to being older yourselves. It’s natural, but not unavoidable or anything. It doesn’t have many benefits either, being hyper-judgemental seldom does, outside of a courtroom anyway.
This is a nice piece of writing, and a good message
Yeah, too bad it has litetally nothing to do with Jodie’s complaints…
Except for directly addressing/rebutting them in entirety… Jodie is passing judgment on the whole generation, albeit with relatively softer wording.
If you read the one line that’s quoted and taken out of context.
If you read the one line that’s quoted and taken out of context.
I read the whole article. But sure, the multiple quotes in the article could be presented in a way that misrepresents what she actually said. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Millennial here. I love working with gen Z! They’re almost always the happiest people on site, which is contagious; and they don’t put up with near as much shit as mine or any of the older generations do.
Give it a few more years and we’re going to see more strikes than a bowling alley - gen Z will go down as a major contributor to workers’ rights.
… and they don’t put up with near as much shit as mine or any of
This is why she finds them annoying.
An ex fellow manager here- we will call him Dumbass- bitched constantly about “kids these days” (meaning Gen Z… though he’ll say he means millennials. That was a fun conversation.)
At least he did until the union got wind of all the shit he was doing. (And no… our boss wasn’t down with that either… he was only with us for about 2 weeks.)
I think the cake was him making people clean off his car when it snowed.
She has quotes why she finds them annoying, no need of making a strawman. Coming in at 10:30 to work has nothing to do with workers rights, it’s unprofessional and disrespectful (assuming other people are waiting for you).
And how much you wanna bet that doesn’t actually happen?
I’ve never had gen z pull that without good reason. We have more issues with boomers than the other way around.
Oh, and by the way… it very much is a workers rights issue when they’re sick or need to take the kid to the doctor or something. Which, we do have that happening.
Again with the strawman arguments? It’s not a justified reason. The quote is literally “I’m not feeling it, I’m coming in at 10:30 today”. Which at a movie set I understand how disruptive it can be. It’s not a software dev job where you can do your job from 13 to 22 for all everyone cares.
I don’t have a solid argument one way or another, but I will chime in to say that as someone in a leadership position, 99% of the time someone complains about a late co-worker, it’s an older person annoyed with a younger person being late in a situation that doesn’t remotely affect them. They’re just annoyed that “young people have no work ethic.”
But I do see your point as well. Years ago, I worked in healthcare, and lateness could literally impact patient care, so that was completely different.
Most often though, I’ve seen people simply annoyed with the idea that other people are late.
I have no way of knowing the exact circumstances of Jodie Foster’s complaints. If people start work on the set by chatting and making small talk like they do in a lot of workplaces, then I can’t blame people for not showing up on time, but I have no idea what their actual workday looks like, so I’ll withhold judgment.
Sometimes, being the calm voice in the middle is much more valuable than having a “solid argument”. You sound like a very reasonable person that I wouldn’t mind having as a boss.
Thanks, I try. I feel like I succeed at this a lot more in real life than I do online. At least, I try to be understanding.
Also, the people I work with are excellent. It’s not that they’re complaining about each other constantly, though it is something that’s happened a few times, always about a co-worker being late or opting to work unconventional hours such as evenings and weekends. To me, these are non-issues. I feel like everybody does their best, and the work gets done.
Of course it depends, totally agree. I work in IT so I don’t care when my colleagues come and go, but certain professions this is not acceptable.
The quote is literally “I’m not feeling it, I’m coming in at 10:30 today”. Which at a movie set I understand how disruptive it can be. It’s not a software dev job where you can do your job from 13 to 22 for all everyone cares
And I’m saying that probably doesn’t actually happen.
At worst I’m calling her a liar for exagerating what does happen. That’s not a strawman. Obviously, I don’t have the evidence for it- I’ve never worked for her. What I do know is that I have never had this issue. What I have had- as a manager, dealing with Gen Z- is people calling in sick while boomers complain about how “lazy” they are.
This, too, is not a straw man. This is an observation from my own experience. Maybe TV set Gen-Z are different. but I doubt it.
Is Jodie Foster a well-known liar? Seriously, I have no idea.
If not, you’re just being weirdly defensive of people you don’t know. Her anecdotes are as valid as yours, and since she probably works with more teams, they may have a bigger data source than your own.
I’ve had her experience and yours at different workplaces.
My workday is 7.30 to 16.00. My gen-z employee works 10.00 to 17.00. That’s not unprofessional, that’s work-life balance. And if you plan meetings with him at 9.30, you’re the unprofessional one.
It depends on the work being done and the workplace expectations. If there is a clear expectation that you will be at work at 0800 and someone shows up at 1030 for no reason, that’s not good. It may have resulted in a lot of people stuck waiting on that one person. I used to deal with both sides of this at a previous job. I’m not a morning person, not by any stretch of the imagination. I also worked with a lot of military types, which means that 0600 was sleeping in for them. They would regularly try to schedule meetings as early as 0700 and I had to push back on it. Thankfully, we had official “core hours” of 0900 to 1500. The expectation was that we would be available for meetings between those hours and did not need to be available outside those hours (so long as we worked our 8). This also meant that I needed to have my tired arse in the office and ready to go at 0900, as this was a very common time for meetings.
Just going by the given statement in the article, it seems that there was an expectation for the person to be in earlier and they called off without warning or a reason. Maybe they just did have one and didn’t want to give it. But, the given statement is “I’m not feeling it”. If there is an expectation that one is in earlier, and they just fob it off like that, that’s pretty unprofessional.
Yes, let’s make all 100 employees adjust their schedules for Bob who likes to sleep in.
It depends on what you do. If you work an assemblyline, obviously that’s not an option. If you work in an office, then it’s pretty normal not to schedule meetings when someone isn’t available, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t plan a meeting during someone’s morning stand-up, and I wouldn’t plan a meeting during their free evening. Why is it a problem when someone starts late? (Assuming they don’t just 90 minutes late)
This is interesting, and puts me on the fence. I can see that it’s crap to be basically abused in some instances when it comes to blue collar jobs, but then if we things become financially impacting, then doesn’t the other counties that also not give two shits on employment law, win out?
I didn’t study economics, so am probably missing something massive here. Educate me please. Capitalism is a right shit really when you look at it.
Ya, all the Boomer/X/too many Millenials and their “suck it up, buttercup” bullshit. I say right on Zs, show us the way. I’m already adapted to their way of thinking muchly. Not taking any further shit compliments of “my elders”, fuck 'em
Hey gen x, we are getting mentioned. Thats like finding a map that actually has new zealand on it.
X is usually included as the boomer category by the Z’s
Really? Well then fuck them! Tsk x and boomer is NOT the same
Old, rich celebrity hates adapting to changing social dynamics. Film at eleven.
It’s just a generation gap. It’s been happening since time out of mind. Take this quote:
"They need to learn how to relax, how to not think about it so much, how to come up with something that’s theirs.”
If you haven’t read the story yet, it’s not clear who said it. That could be from or about anyone. It’s good advice for anyone.
Maybe Foster has a different opinion about some things, but she’s not being rude or nasty. Different things are important to different generations, and that’s okay.
The team I manage are Millennials and Gen Z (I’m a slightly older Xer, born a couple of weeks before Kurt Cobain).
Here is a problem some folks might not have considered that doesn’t really have anything to do with the “nature” of the younger generations. I fight very hard for flexible hours, better compensation, scheduling flexibility, etc. I do not tell my folks how to do something, I leave that to them, and they’ll generally find a better way than the way I initially imagined. Someone needs a day off or to come in/leave at a different time or to WFH, I never ask why.
And generally our CEO has given me what I want, and I can give my people what they want. Admittedly, this is in part due to the nature of what my team does and the visible quality of our work (not IT, btw). So far so good.
The problem is other managers. Other Xers and a couple of Boomers. They see my department getting all this stuff, and they start getting paranoid their departments (or other companies; we are a conglomerate) will start demanding the same. And they do not understand WFH, worse they are afraid of it. Likewise with all the QoL and work/life balance stuff. And if their people found out about the raises my people got, oh boy would that be a problem for the other managers.
That’s often where the real fight inside companies is, between managers vying with each to determine which way the company will go, or to, at least, to keep their part of it a nice ecosystem to work in. Fear of change is a big factor.
Newsflash : every generation can be annoying to work with
I have some on my team
They can’t write to save their lives. I’m not sure if that’s generalized or not.
I’ve noticed a consistent decline in all skills in the last decade of new apprentices. It used to be that you’d get a “computer smart” kid or a “hand skills” kid, farm, shop class, etc. Now I typically see neither. My last apprentice had only ever used an iPhone and a Chromebook(what schools use now apparently) and an Xbox. So when I handed him my laptop to teach him how to configure some devices he got lost on the use of filling in an excel spreadsheet and saving and finding and opening the files. It would have been just as fast to have someone who’d never even seen a computer before. And he wasn’t able to lift very heavy things and had poor grip strength. Good kid, he’ll be ok but it could all be a lot easier for all of us.
I blame the school systems and the general trend of making all devices extremely consumer unfriendly. I used to tinker with all the aspects of the family computer as a kid, and my dad and his friends would regularly get together and work on their vehicles. Now every device is more appliance than tool. Anyways that’s my prematurely old man rant for the day.
It is not.
I am gen z. Bit of an exception as I’ve been around older people entire life and mom read to me every single night as a kid.
WE CANT FUCKING READ. Any time I’ve come into contact with people of my generation they will almost always have a shit work ethic, subpar spelling. Text abbreviations, leaving work, showing up when they want, etc. Not going to act as though I’m perfect but it’s real.
Work ethic is horrendous generally speaking. There’s something to be said about how boomers killed themselves at a company and said thank you sir, BUT, to take that the opposite direction and be a flakey piece of shit is another story.
iT’s ALL TEh PORKEYMANS AnD AVORCORDO TORST
She sounds like a real complainer. I’d bet she’s the one that’s hard to work with and then blames everyone else.
Or you know, just an older person going “Kids these days”. It’s a much more likely explanation considering Jodie Foster has been working in Hollywood since she was a child, and people that are actually hard to get with would have gotten soft blacklisted long, especially a non-AAA star.
I mean we already know she hates men.
That’s a pretty terrible article, not even with the ink it wasn’t printed on…
It’s really popular to shit on young people, it’s pretty much Bill Maher’s entire routine these days.
I think it’s misguided. All the things that have led to this - education budgets being cut, universities charging extortionate fees, tech ruining attention spans, general malaise because of climate change, increasing wealth inequality, lack of affordable access to mental health care, offshoring of good manufacturing jobs, and so on. These things were mostly the result of the actions of boomers, and they’re the ones still running the show.
Those same boomers who love to shit on young people.
I think ageism is going to be the final frontier of prejudice. I see folks who advocate for every other kind of acceptance just absolutely bash older generations and vice versa. Nothing unites us quite like our disdain for people who aren’t roughly the same age as us.
But the truth is we’re all equally shitty. If some divinity snapped its fingers and swapped entire generations through time, none of us would do any better or worse than the generations whose place we were taking the place of.
I just wish we could collectively do less finger pointing and more collaborative problem solving.
Now, generations are a made up social construct. And I think most people would find they have more in common with working class boomers than they do with the rich their own age.
That said society changes very fast now. There are big differences in how 17 year olds now and 17 year olds 50 years ago were raised and socialised. And age is more than just a number. We’ll always discriminate against the young or the old in professional etc contexts because there’s just some jobs that are more suited to the young or that we don’t trust someone very young to have enough experience to do.
Never have “ok, boomer” been more appropriate.
You’re just doing the same shit when you say that.
Ok, boomer.
I’m impressed she actually got them to do any work.
